“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The balancing act: juggling time, cost, and quality
There’s a saying that all projects have three main factors: time, cost and quality. Stakeholders usually have to choose which two are most important. This isn’t always true; stakeholders often don’t make informed decisions so projects take longer, cost more and still don’t meet the users’ needs.
Every project is limited by the resources available, so how can we deliver on time and make sure it works?
There are many tips, tools and techniques for supporting quicker delivery that we use at Acutest. But as Hemmingway (above) suggests, it’s not about what you don’t have, it’s about what you can do with what you have.
This article describes three principles that can help you deliver without extra resources, save you time and hopefully help your stakeholders to sleep well at night. It focuses on the easiest elements to control.
1. Do less – Essential tasks only
On every late-running project, we’ve seen teams working on things that don’t matter. It’s easier to spot unnecessary extras but it’s hard to remove most non-essential tasks.
Identify the tasks that you must do by performing a risk assessment. Hold a workshop with both the business and technical stakeholders and ask yourselves:
- How likely is it that this technology will fail?
- How serious would it be to the business if it did fail?
Plot each of the tasks on a risk matrix like the one below and then focus your scarce resources on those tasks that occupy the top-right quadrants of your matrix. These highest priority tasks or features are the ones which are likely to fail and/or fail with catastrophic results.
Tasks occupying the lower-left quadrants are unlikely to fail and even if they did, users wouldn’t usually notice. Plan to develop these features once the more business-critical and technically-complicated features have been delivered. People usually don’t notice if minor features aren’t delivered so if you run out of time, stakeholders will be happier going live without them.
2. Be efficient – Take every possible shortcut
“We always do it this way” – effective leadership will encourage everyone to find the shortcuts. There are two key rules to these shortcuts:
Motivate everyone to collaborate and take the beneficial shortcuts. Be open and encourage stakeholders to let go of blinkered approaches and work efficiently towards common goals across the development lifecycle.
Understand the advantage of every tool that is used. Quantify and agree on the benefits in advance, then choose and use tools only if you’re confident they will economically deliver those benefits. Don’t waste time and money on tools with no clear advantage.
A note of caution: if the shortcut causes technical debt, make a note and never hide it. For example, Acutest has focused on how our business analysts can work when writing requirements. We improved the speed of writing and approving requirements by tweaking the process and using generative AI. This led to fewer errors and requirements in a test automation-friendly format, saving time.
In our experience, precise requirements always reduce the number of defects, sometimes by as much as 90 per cent (data from a financial services customer used our approach to writing requirements in a second phase, enabling like-for-like comparisons).
3. Provide clarity – Use real-time status reports
It’s human nature to want to please and consequently most project reporting presents a rosy view of a project’s status. If there are problems that can’t be glossed over then there is little information to help management understand how bad the situation is, what action they need to take, and where should they spend their resources to mitigate the most important problems.
A common example of a project-status report from one of our clients showed that over 75 per cent of testing was complete and go-live was running only slightly behind schedule, giving the impression that management intervention wasn’t needed. In reality, the project was in dire need of help:
- There were features in the functional requirements that weren’t in the plan so they were not included in the reported 75 per cent figure.
- The least important features were the first to be worked on, saving the difficult ones for later. The missing 25 per cent of deliverables would take almost half of the project effort (not 25 per cent) and the time needed to deliver the most complex functionality meant that the schedule was going to be significantly exceeded.
If the project leaders want to be able to make informed decisions, it’s vital that all stakeholders, not just the technologists, share a single view of what is going on. Stakeholders need to understand the status and progress of all activities and what this means for the overall project. This means your reports need to:
- Give a clear visual summary that can be absorbed in a glance and is readily understood by all stakeholders.
- Provide the context necessary to understand each issue by relating those issues to requirements, business processes or user outcomes.
- Prioritise the issues so that management time, decision-making and scarce resources are focused on mitigating the problems that will have the greatest impact and not on issues that users probably won’t notice if they aren’t fixed.
By replacing their standard reporting with a clearer and more informative approach, our client was able to:
Focus their effort on high-priority items by developing and testing the features most likely to fail and interrupt the service.
Report the status against the required features so that business stakeholders could answer the question: “if I decide to go live today, what would work?”.
Create real-time reports so everyone could immediately see the status of the project and take immediate remedial actions.
Ultimately the project recovered and the service went live on time. Some low-priority elements weren’t delivered but no one noticed.
Call to action
Think of what you can do with what you have. Follow the three principles above and you’ll find that you can always do more than you might expect.
Please contact me at tom.norris@acutest.com for more information and to discuss further.
Tom Norris is the co-founder of Acutest.
