Friday Morning

Sam watched as the managers entered the conference room for their weekly management team meeting and found seats around the table. He could tell from both their joking and serious discussions that they respected and trusted each other more than they had when he first met them. Flip charts covered the conference room walls. The flip charts showed action items and completed tasks for the project to fix the build system. Sam sensed that the management team was starting to jell. They were ready to start solving problems as a group in their management team meeting.

“Okay, let’s work on our issue for this week: how we manage requests. Kevin, since you brought it up, tell us how the current practice affects you.”

“Okay. Ginger, you receive a bazillion requests from Marketing for changes.” (See Figure 7, ​How requests enter the group​.)

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Figure 7. How requests enter the group.

Ginger nodded.

“Those changes may start out looking like GUI changes, but they end up affecting the middleware and the backend components, too,” Kevin explained.

“What I’m realizing is that none of us understand the ripple effects of the changes that come into Ginger’s group,” Kevin said. “Ginger gets a work request, and we need to know how that change affects all of us—how big the change is, and what each of us has to do to make the change work, before we start designing or coding. We’re not always working on the most important thing—at least my group isn’t. When something more important comes up, we drop what we’re doing and shift to that, or we add more tasks.”

“Nice summary, Kevin. Thank you,” said Sam. “Let’s gather a little data. How do the requests come in now?”

Together they created a picture of how requests came into the group. They discovered that while Ginger thought all the changes came in through her, it turned out Patty received requests for field changes that she then handed off to Ginger and Kevin. Jason sometimes received requests from Operations that he handed off to Kevin, Ginger, and Patty.

Kevin looked at the picture and sighed. “I thought more of them came in through Ginger. This is a bigger problem than I thought.”

Ginger started to say, “Those little…,” but clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oops. Sorry. I’m working on my language.”

“I know it would be easy to push this off on Marketing,” Sam said. “But before we ask them to fix the problem, let’s see what we can do within our own department. Let’s see if we can change the way we work before we ask someone else to change.

“This is a group problem; it affects all of us. Everyone is a source of requests. All of you would like to plan your work better. How can we channel all these requests so that we can assess their importance and how the work affects each group?”

Ginger held up her hand with all five fingers extended. “We could limit Marketing to five requests a month,” Ginger offered.

“Or we could have them list everything they want to change at the beginning of the year and then sign off on it,” Kevin suggested. “We’d have to let them change their minds every month, I guess.”

“I could really live with changes only once a month,” Jason said. “Let’s do that.”

“Before we decide on that, let’s see if we can come up with at least one more idea so we have three to choose from,” said Sam.

“We could set up a database of requests,” Patty suggested. “Maybe we could start with a spreadsheet. Anyone can enter a request, but then we have to prioritize it as a group.”

“That’s a good idea, too,” Jason said.

“So far all our ideas are about how we take in requests. What about some ideas about how we implement requests?” Sam suggested.

“We may need to do that too, but first we have to manage the flow before I have time to figure out how to develop differently,” Kevin said.

Wow, thought Sam. He’s not sucking it up anymore. Good for him! “Okay, let’s return to managing the requests. Which is our best option?”

“The database,” Kevin stated with conviction. “What do you guys think?”

Jason and Patty agreed. “I still want them to have only five requests a month,” Ginger acceded, “but I guess I’ll go along.”

“So, how do we make this work? We understand the priority from our perspective. I think we need to talk to Marketing, so we understand what they need.” Sam suggested.

“We need Operations, too,” Jason added.

“True enough. It sounds like we need a cross-functional group to assess priority,” Sam said. “What information does that group need to make good decisions?”

“They need to know if the work is hard or easy to do,” Ginger proposed.

“Hard or easy might be one way to categorize it,” Sam agreed. “Do we know how long an easy request takes? Or a difficult one?”

“We need to know how much it will cost to support,” Jason offered.

“Good. What else?”

When no one offered suggestions, Sam prompted, “How about the benefit vs. the cost to implement and how it fits with the goal for the product?”

Everyone nodded.

“Anything else we missed?”

They all shook their heads. “But we’ll never squeeze all that information out of them,” Patty said.

Sam continued. “You’re right. That’s asking a lot. Maybe all that information is our ultimate goal. We can start by understanding the size of the request and whether Marketing still wants it once they realize the cost to implement and support it.”

“We need to discuss how often to evaluate the list and when to change priorities of our work,” Sam said.

Ginger said slowly, “What if we changed our work every couple of months? Do you think that’s often enough?”

Kevin replied, “Not for me. The changes come in too fast for me to try to plan a couple of months out. How about a couple of weeks?”

“Most of our requests take longer than a couple of weeks. But we can do most of them within three to four weeks. How about if we evaluate the list and change our work once a month?” Jason asked. Kevin looked skeptical, but agreed.

Patty nodded. Ginger said, “I think it’s hard to break them of the habit of asking for features whenever they want, but I think it’s worth a try.”

Sam summarized, “It’s not just their habit; it’s our habit too. We’re going to have to say what easy or hard means so they have enough information to make good decisions. And, we’ll have to finish the work when we say we will. We’ll have to back our people up to make sure that all changes go through our database of requests, not sliding in through the back door. I’ll take the lead on talking to Marketing to make sure this solution meets their needs, too.”

Together, the management team developed an action plan, signed up for tasks, and agreed to check in at the next management team meeting.