By the way: it's your job to buffer the pressure from upper management towards the team so they can see you have a backbone and to maintain morale. They are _your_ team.
Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#42I suspect that you did not managed expectations. PO was not really working as the proper owner and have no clue about progress and effort being put. Your direct manager does not care as it can always blame everything on you. And the team is not so great if they have problems with "comfort zone". First get PO on board. Choose the process that will push PO into the central role: Kanban, Scrum, XP(anything really). Work…
And if it's an online solution, propose to roll out some features gradually.
But yeah: 1. Be honest with everyone 2. Invest in online courses for everyone 3. Lay out a simple roadmap for the minimum MVP 4. Hustle
And next time use my recipe for estimating. Spend ~ a day on this.
1. Split up everything into the smallest subtasks 2. Estimate the time all subtasks take. Uncertain? Write down a low and a high. Still uncertain? Split the task into subtasks or confer with someone. 3. Add the times together and multiply by pi. If applicable, do it once for the high and once for the low. 4. Present the high estimate. It is probably closer to the truth. Estimating the low as well is more of a psychological trick.
Don't use the subtasks for the development though. They will be too fine grained.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Organized on the 2x2 with these axes X: "risk/complexity" Y:"desirability" (that's business & customer desirability.) Not to sound like an idiot here or anything, but does that mean something like this: Risk | Complexity ---------------------------------- BiZ desirability | | ---------------------------------- Cus desirability | | Can't an item be in many of these squares?
What's being described is an X-Y scatter plot: Necessary ^ | Simple Complex | V Nice to have
This makes the most sense to me.
If I were in the OP's position, I would start discussion with the direct manager as early as possible - and begin by breaking down the remaining scope in terms of where the features are in this diagram.
If the product must be "ready to ship", clearly some corners will need to be cut - especially the bottom right.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#44Cut features until it'd make the deadline, even weeks before the deadline. Have something to show. That's my only advice.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#45Sounds kind of familiar. We started a mvp/prototype that was handed to one guy without that much of a planning. That guy is really good coder but not a product owner/manager, documentor or planner. You see where this is going? This was about empowering team members with responsibility. Without a concrete plan it was really hard for the rest of us to help or say what's really important. And so began the feature creep…
> Without a concrete plan it was really hard for the rest of us to help or say what's really important. And so began the feature creep for something that was suppose to be a quick prototype ended up being whole implementation which took half a year to get first somewhat working version.
This is interesting. Every example of scope creep I've run into has been a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, or an over-zealous "thinker" (as opposed to a "doer"). If I want to avoid scope creep I limit the scope of the project to as few people as possible and get them as close to the users/market as possible.
It sounds more to me like everyone did get their two cents in, but not in the correct way, and this lone developer was formulating the requirements based on way too many informal channels rather than one structured one.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#46Whatever you do, DO NOT ADD new team members to an already delayed project. It will delay it further. Break down the project into simpler tasks that can be assigned to a team member and be tracked. Attach strict responsibility of task to team member. And last and most important, talk to your Management about timelines. Make it very upfront that it will take X number of days and no lesser.
3 months is actually enough time to add people, especially if there's the possibility of a deadline extension. I normally consider 1 month the break even point. You do have to schedule training and all.
Another way to look at it is that programmers hate death marches. Projects like this could lose people, and sometimes it's good to have some backup.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#47> we're not going to make the release > At what point should I start sounding the alarm? Immediately. IMMEDIATELY
Yes, ring it loud. If you think there might not be enough time, there's almost certainly not enough time.
Start setting up meetings with the project owner ASAP. People are usually more angry if not informed. If they've been informed in advance, there are a lot of options that can be taken, and it lifts a little blame off the dev team.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#48Words I've used with success before: "I've got some bad news. I've been running the numbers and based on our current progress, it doesn't look like we're going to hit our release schedule. Now, it's possible that we've just hit a slow patch and we will pick up steam later on, but my experience has been that this rarely happens. Everybody on the team is still really optimistic and we're working very hard to hit the re…
If you get the marketing team response, determine what has actually been marketed. You can probably remove some things with noone being the wiser. Create a prioritised backlog. You'll be the only one knowing that feature X probably won't reach the release, but noone will care. I did this recently and everyone were excited about the release, despite pushing for some features that were labeled low pri.
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#49Words I've used with success before: "I've got some bad news. I've been running the numbers and based on our current progress, it doesn't look like we're going to hit our release schedule. Now, it's possible that we've just hit a slow patch and we will pick up steam later on, but my experience has been that this rarely happens. Everybody on the team is still really optimistic and we're working very hard to hit the re…
This is really fantastic advice, and well said
Re: Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?
#50Who said it was going to be done in 3 months? Where did that unrealistic number come from?