No time

There is never enough time. Every successful company has more work than they can handle. There is no problem in that, it is more a luxury problem. Except when you can't handle it. A lot of work can lead to stress and stress leads to suffering. You can work harder, make more time (time is relative) and try to go faster but that depletes resources in no time. There are a couple of common pitfalls we see that leads to too much work and no time to do it. Let's have a look at those and find out how we can resolve this issue.

The loudest customer

First of all there is the situation of the loudest customer. That is the customer that screams the hardest and makes the most emotional impact on the introvert engineer. The engineer feels threatened and will try to make this go away by implementing the change as fast as possible. We can mitigate this by denying direct contact between engineer and customer and place a product owner in between them. PO's are more extravert, they manage the backlog and can do politics with customers, shielding the engineer in the process.

The most persistent customer

Besides a loud customer it is also possible there is a very persistent customer, who doesn't play on emotion, but will frequently contact the engineer or PO for a specific change. Because it is impossible to do all the things at once, prioritizing is the solution. We call that prioritization the backlog. A PO is owner of the backlog and plays all the games with the customers to order the items on the backlog by importance or business value. With a persistent customer the PO can forward the customer to the backlog.

The helpful employee

A helpful employee sounds good, but too helpful isn't good at all. When the employee helps the customer, and make them happy, they don't work on the backlog and are thus not working on the most important items. They dissatisfy other customers who's work has been planned and possibly delayed or not done. A team should deny working on anything else than what is on the backlog, forwarding the customer to the PO to negotiate a spot on the backlog.

The planning PO

In many occasions PO's assign work to engineers in the planning session. They focus on efficiency instead of effectiveness by doing this. Which means that everybody is busy with individual work, forgetting about sharing, building knowledge and most importantly they forget to put the team in control. Work should be ordered by the PO in the backlog. Engineers pick the most important item during the planning of the day and form a team to build a solution to that particular change. More than one engineer is working on the same change, ensuring quality. This way of working focusses on effectiveness and getting things done.

The important manager

Oh, how often have I seen managers walking into a team room and sorting out one engineer to do something for a particular customer completely skipping the product owner, any agreements, any priorities. The engineer will not say no to a manager (most of the time). This form is very disruptive and undermines the position of all team members, the product owner and the scrum master. Modern leaders should facilitate, not delegate. Solve this by coaching managers into a role of servitude; great leaders serve the team.

Feature driven

Nowadays most teams are setting a step from agile to devops, by incorporate run into their daily work. This means teams need to reserve time for maintenance, housekeeping and incidents. Too much focus on developing new features will result in an increase in technical debt. The more technical debt is acquired the slower development of new features will get, ultimately grinding to a halt. Reserve time for maintenance and incidents and keep technical debt to a minimum to ensure flexibility to build new features.

SPO(F/K)

A single point of knowledge is a huge problem. Engineers with a lot of knowledge in a team with less knowledge, are busy doing all the work while some team mates sit idle. Forbid any engineering work for this kind of people and make them teach and coach until the rest of the team is up to par.

In summary, get PO's in place to handle the backlog and set priorities fencing off customers and management. Forbid working from anything else than the backlog. Let the team plan. Share your knowledge.