Do Less to Do More

This is one of the counter intuitive lessons I learned when managing large scale projects: to get more done, you have to do less.

Or, restated: you deliver far more value over time by completing projects sequentially, rather than spreading your efforts across multiple projects.

Let’s explore two scenarios for achieving the same goal: delivering three projects on a three month timeline.

In both scenarios, the same projects are delivered to the same deadline. In Scenario A, they are worked on in parallel. In Scenario B, they are worked on sequentially.

When you’re looking at this from an effort and deadline perspective, the results are exactly the same: the same amount of effort, and all delivered by the required deadline. Good job!

But wait a minute —

In Scenario B, Project 1 has been completed and live two entire months before the deadline, allowing your sales, marketing, support, and product teams to realize revenue, get feedback, and start planning for the next iteration while your other two projects are being built.

All other things being equal, you’ve delivered an additional three months of value over the course of a three month development period — two extra months for Project 1, plus one extra month for Project 2.

That’s huge!

This is the work in progress (WIP) principal — given constrained scope and effort, serializing your work has a profound impact on the value of what you deliver over time.

But there’s a trap.

Identifying Work in Progress

When I’m coaching engineers, I look at how many open tickets or PRs they have. It’s a goldmine of information about working style, collaboration, and team efficiency. When someone has a bunch of open tickets, I see someone who’s highly motivated, but gets stuck waiting — so they pick up more work to fill in the “dead time” to feel like they’re being productive.

If you’ve ever worked in an environment where it took a long time to get a build, to run your tests, to get feedback on a PR, to get an answer from your product owner or architect — you know exactly what I’m talking about. Sometimes it feels like you’re spending more time waiting than working, and when you’re on a deadline? You wanna get the work done! Why not smash out another ticket while you’re on hold?

These are great intentions with unfortunate results: it creates more work in progress, more context switching, more waiting, more unresolved decisions, and a growing pile of unmerged PRs.

The strategy to address this problem is the mindset shift from “what can I do to stay productive” to “what can I do to accelerate the people who depend on me.”

Latency is the Killer

The number one thing you can do to accelerate your team is decrease waiting time — and if this is starting to smell like a latency problem in a microservice environment or a SLA problem, you’re on the right track: you’re seeing the system and how the pieces depend on each other.

To address WIP problems, the most important question you can ask is “what are you waiting for?” Don’t try to divine the answer yourself; talk with your teammates and go deep on open tickets and PRs and start mapping out the dependencies on people and processes.

Your first instinct might be to try and speed up responses within your team: chase people on GitHub, Jira, and Slack to get answers, finish code reviews, etc. But now you’ve created another problem: thrashing.

By interrupting your teammates to accelerate your work, you’re breaking their flow and slowing them down — you’re still stuck in the mindset of “how do I stay productive” rather than what you can do to accelerate the entire team.

Flip the Script

When you hit a blocking point in your work, notify the people who can help you, but don’t demand an immediate response.

Then, find asynchronous ways to unblock your teammates: look for open PRs you can review or merge, and look for work you can do that doesn’t have external dependencies to complete, like improving documentation, or cleaning out your inbox, or prepping for your next meeting.

The next level is announcing that you’re available to help. You might be surprised at how many people want to jump on a five minute video chat to work through a problem with you — even if you’re a junior or new to the team. A five minute chat could resolve a PR that’s been open for days, or provide some insight that accelerates you or your teammate.

You might not be able to fix all the problems, but guess what — you’re working with a bunch of creative and thoughtful people who thrive on solving hard problems, and want to improve their quality of life at work.

Focus your attention on how to work as a team, not just your tickets, and you’re going to see great results.