(2017-12-03) Running In Circles

Running in Circles – Signal v. Noise

People in our industry think they stopped doing waterfall and switched to agile software development. In reality they just switched to high-frequency waterfall.

But speed isn’t the problem. And cycles alone don’t help you ship. The problems are doing the wrong things, building to specs, and getting distracted

Deliberate resource allocation

Only management can protect attention. Telling the team to focus only works if the business is backing them up

Mutable requirements

At Basecamp we kick off each project with a core concept. We do our homework on the strategy side to validate that some version of the idea is meaningfully doable in the time we’re allocating

In practice, this means giving the teams power to redefine scope. Some things are essential and other things aren’t. The team must be able to know the difference and make calls accordingly. To reinforce this, we give teams low fidelity hand-drawn sketches when a cycle starts and spend more time on motivation than the specifics of design and implementation

Uphill strategies

Work that requires problem solving is more like a hill. There’s an uphill phase where you figure out how to do it. Then when you get to the top you can see down the other side and see what it’ll take to finish.

At Basecamp our teams seek out the areas with the scariest unknowns and work on them first.

We recently started formalizing this with the Hill Chart. A question we often ask these days is “where is that on the hill?”