Visualize Your Project’s Delays

Maybe your team has all the people it needs. And your management makes decisions when they need to do so. And you have no delays in your releases—your team can release whatever it wants whenever it wants. You have no friction in your product development. If so, skip this section.

Many teams have some sort of delay in their projects. Sometimes management doesn’t decide to start the project until the project is already late. Sometimes you have a geographically distributed team with built-in time-zone delays. Sometimes you need specialists from across the organization. And you might depend on other people to actually release the product to your customers.

You have delays in your project. Delays prevent teams from making progress. The diagram illustrates how you can see your delays.

At time T0, management says, “Yes, let’s do this.” You might not see the item on your backlog until time T1. If your organization measures the difference between T1 and T0 in months, that’s an enormous impediment. Make that impediment visible to everyone. You might need help to remove that problem. That delay from T0 to T1 is often a project portfolio problem. See Manage Your Project Portfolio [Rot16a] for ideas.

If your team has a large backlog, it might take weeks or months to start work on that item. That’s what T2 means. Now, if you have a full cross-functional team that can deliver anything it needs, you won’t have the extra time for the T3 and T4 cycles. However, if you have component teams or specialists, or shared-services “teams,” your project will start work at T2, have the work cycle between the specialists and the team for T3, and not finish until T4.

If you have small stories in a complete cross-functional team, you might keep the difference between T4 and T2 to a day or so. However, once you need other teams to finish what one team starts, you have a cost of delay. (See Diving for Hidden Treasures [RE16] for more possible delays.) Once you see your delays, you can decide what to do. At the very least, raise the issue to your managers as an impediment.

The difference between T4 and T5 might be due to insufficient functionality for customers. Or it might be because you have a packaging process in your organization. For example, if you box your product in some way, you will see a delay between T4 and T5. If you have a different group that releases the product, possibly via a staging and production system, you will see a delay between T4 and T5.

Delays have implications on your ability to recognize revenue, acquire or retain customers, and better the customer’s experience with your product. Delays—by themselves—are not the issue. The issue is what the delays cost the team and the organization. You can measure the effects of these delays once you see them.