I had quite an insightful discuss today. One of those days when you stop for a moment to look at the point where your organization is. These are very valuable moments because for a moment you leave everyday approach (we’re fighting hard to complete the project; we’re improving that because it was all screwed up) and try to judge with no bias how things really look (we’re doing fine work but the project is still a piece of crap; improvements are huge but we’re still a hundred years behind the third world).
While typical mindset focused on the flow and those little improvements you do to make constant progress, those flashes of true sight are needed to properly set direction of the process as a whole. While you can be happy with team performance and result of their work in a given situation, it doesn’t automatically mean all is set up properly. The chances are good you will find many flaws if you look from a distance.
OK, you have improved your KPIs of resolution time overrun for submitted issues from 600 days in a single month to 3 days during half of the year, but what about software development process? Unit tests? Nope. Code review? Nope. Formalized quality assurance? Still nope. Don’t be so proud then and go continue your job, you have still much to do.
Process improvement should be constant, that’s nothing new. However, we often forget to make a little stop from time to time, take a deep breath and face the tough truth: how far you are from the finish line and if direction you’ve chosen shouldn’t be adjusted. It’s a bit like sharpening the saw. Discussions with former colleagues can be very helpful in that area.
And yes, there’s still pretty darn much work to be done here.
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