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Just One More

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One more slice of turkey, just a touch more gravy, maybe one more chocolate for dessert – there is always temptation to indulge a bit more than usual over the holidays, and the seasonal vices can easily become habits. After all, what’s wrong with just one more little tidbit? 

Those that recall Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life might understand the potential implications of a single after-dinner mint. 

In the business world, as we look at all the projects we have on our plate at any one time, there can be a strong temptation to take on just one more, but we need to be very careful that we understand the implications of our decisions. Our portfolio plate only has so much capacity, and while we can make several trips to the trough or get a bigger plate, we need to make these decisions consciously. 

Pressures come within projects as well. For those that are developing software products, there is always pressure to cram more features into the next release, often to the point where they suffer with the indigestion of half-baked ideas afterwards. For those that manage to juggle a number of clients concurrently, there is the pressure to maintain the pipeline and bring new clients into the fray as soon as you they can be signed on, and the team can easily get spread too thinly to truly satisfy any of the clients. 

Then there are those that would like to think they are developing a product, but jump when a single customer suggests that they need yet another feature - at which point, they really need to ask if they are actually a product company after all. 

Project or portfolio, it is a careful juggling act that we must run to gain the most satisfaction out of our efforts while not overtaxing our resources. At any point in time, we have our current level of work on our plate, and we have a constant influx of potential changes. These changes can be internally or externally driven – change requests, problems to fix, new projects to take on. They should all be handled together in the same manner, and all potential changes, regardless of source, can vary in a number of dimensions: 

- Necessity of incorporating the change: some changes, such as the discovery that our planned approach to implementing a solution won’t work, must be dealt with, while others are completely discretionary. Deal with the ones that must be handled as soon as they are discovered, apply triage to the remainder. 

- Impact to existing work: our current expectation of who is doing what and when will be impacted by any change. We need to understand the implications to the timelines of individuals as well as to the higher level expectations of milestones for existing projects, both positive and negative, factoring in the impacts of learning curves and recovery periods required after strenuous bursts (they are just bursts, aren’t they?). 

- Impact to portfolio value: not all change is bad, and while some changes can be disappointing, others can open huge new opportunities for the business. Be careful to maximize the overall value of the portfolio that is being developed, which will allow you to focus more appropriately on reuse opportunities as well. 

- Risk of incorporating the change: beyond the raw cost of the change, there are several dimensions of risk to consider. How much uncertainty is there in the estimates of work for the change, and how does this change impact the stability of the existing product base? All else being equal, a lower risk change would certainly be more attractive to take on. 

With principles such as ‘make hay while the sun shines’ and ‘the customer is always right’, we all have a tendency to take on more than we can chew – we focus on the allure of increasing the portfolio value while neglecting any realistic assessments of impact to current work and overall risk. While we can get away with a little of this imbalanced perspective, it will eventually overtax our systems, resulting in mistakes, reduced efficiency, failure to deliver as promised. We cannot escape the problems associated with ignoring the capacity of our systems and managing our intake correspondingly. 

This all assumes, of course, that we have a current understanding of our capacity, workload, potential portfolio value and risks to work with. In software companies as in real life, most of us have only a glancing awareness of the relationship of how hard we push ourselves and our ability to sustain production. No change is so small as to have no impact, and even a single after-dinner mint can have disastrous results.

Jim Brosseau of Clarrus Consulting Group 


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