2. Agile projects, especially if you are starting
your agile transition, can have plenty of
problems. Some are technical debt
problems, such as the build taking too long
or having insufficient automated tests to
know if your changes are helping or hurting
the system. But there’s another insidious
management problem when many teams
transition to agile: when the project team is
supposed to work on more than one project
at a time.
3. Sometimes, the team perceives this problem
and solves it during their retrospectives. But
if the team members have been accustomed
to multitasking for years, they may not even
realize this is a problem. Or if the team
realizes that they’re multitasking, they may
not know how to solve the problem. That’s
when a few observations or measurements
may just be what your team needs.
4. If you have people multitasking in a non-agile
project, you might not know until the end of the
project (or until some interim milestone) that the
team members have not spent enough time on your
project for far too long. But on an agile project, you can
tell inside of one iteration. Multitasking slows
everything down and makes people forget where they
were. When developers and testers multitask, they
create problems or lose track of where to look for
problems.
5. Cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs) show how much work in process
there really is on your project. See Figure 1 for a cumulative flow
diagram on a highly multitasked project:
6. You can see that the total work in red continues to
grow throughout the project because the team is
unable to finish much work. There is significant
pressure for more work because the team can’t finish
anything. The work in process is in yellow, and there’s
a significant amount of it. The team is making some
progress later in the year (in the green).
But if you look at the January through June time
period, you can see the team finished almost nothing.
7. They were working on a lot, but they were unable to
finish work. CFDs are useful for the team and for
management. The chart helps people see the effect of
multitasking. Just add all the work in process that the
team is working on and when the team members
finish. You will be amazed.
In addition to a CFD, consider a velocity
chart, primarily for the team. A velocity chart is a guide
for the team to know how much they can commit to
for an iteration.
9. Burnup charts show not just how much work is done but also how much work
is being added to the project. Adding work to a project is a symptom of the
project team not making enough progress for the interested parties. See
Figure 3 for a burnup chart that shows how close to completion a project is
and how much more work is being added.
10. Once you have data, your managers
might decide to manage the project
portfolio and stop the multitasking. If
not, you can defensively manage it. You
have several options: to decide on the
project portfolio yourself; to spend
one-week iterations rolling among
projects, one per iteration; and to
create space in the iteration for ad hoc
work.
