Overtime is the first refuge of bad management.
When teams get behind, as they often do, even with Agile, managers search their bag of tricks for a solution.
All too often, the solution they pick is that solution that was used on them before they became managers.
Obertime.
It didn't work then, and it won't now.
Hi, I'm Mike Cohn and I am the author of three bestselling books on Agil and Scrum.
I help teams succeed with agile and want to help you too.
When a team falls behind schedule, there are many things besides overtime that a manager could try.
They could add people to the team, they could drop a few requirements, that is not drop them but do a simpler version of some.
Managers could extend the deadline.
Why then do managers so often reach for overtime as the solution?
Because it's easy.
Buy team members some pizza and Red Bull, sit back and watch the problem evaporate.
Well, maybe.
Other solutions are harder to enact.
You normally can't add people as quickly as you can buy a pizza.
Dropping requirements takes stakeholder participation.
By the time they agree, the project is either further behind, out of time, or both.
By contrast, asking or worse, telling a team to work overtime is easy and it sometimes works for a short while.
Kent Beck, inventor of the extreme programming agile methodology, has a great approach to overtime.
He says, overtime, is a symptom of a serious problem on the project.
The XP rule is simple.
You can't work a second week of overtime For one week, fine, crank and put in some extra hours.
If you come in on Monday and say, to meet our goals, we'll have to work late again, then you already have a problem that can't be solved by working more
hours One of my clients had to learn this lesson the hard way.
With a major deadline four weeks away, the CTO mandated overtime from everyone on the project.
And for the first week, it worked.
Velocity across all teams was up 22% over the average.
With results like that, he kept the mandatory overtime going.
The second week didn't go as well.
But velocity across all teams on the project was still up 2%. That's better than it would have been without overtime, but not by much.
people were starting to burn out, and in weeks three and four, velocity was down by 16 and 20 percent below the average without overtime.
During this four-week period, the teams actually delivered less with overtime than they would have if they'd worked at a consistent,
sustainable pace.
Even better would've been just one week of overtime to get that little extra surge of progress without burning people out.
There's nothing wrong with an occasional week-long surge of overtime when truly necessary.
In fact, a friend of mine claims that periods like that have been his favorite over his 30-plus years in the software industry.
He loves the team camaraderie and the trust that gets built when everyone comes together to achieve something.
I can't argue with him.
The problem is when overtime becomes the first tool managers reach for, and they see it as the solution to every problem.
Overtime leads to stress, which leads Here's a comparison of four successive projects undertaken at the same company.
Each project was adding functionality to the product, so the complexity is reasonably consistent across all four projects.
The red bars show the number of hours each project is estimated to take.
The blue bars show the number of hours of overtime worked on each project.
Projects 1, 2, and 4 had significant overtime, ranging from 22% on project 1 to 40% project 2. The yellow dots indicate how many defects were found in
each projects.
Look at the numbers of defects in the projects with overtime and compare those to the amount of defect in project 3, which had no overtime.
Overtime stress defects.
It's a predictable cycle many of us have seen time and time again.
An agile team seeks to break the cycle by working at a sustainable pace.
This is where a scrum's term sprint gets in the way.
Sounds like we're supposed to be burned out after a sprint.
We're not.
A bonus of working at a sustainable pace is that a team can choose to surge with up to a week of overtime if they want.
It can help.
And sometimes there are reasons to do it.
Your investors need a demo next week that will determine if the invest more money in the company or the companies will be fined if not in compliance with
a new law ASAP.
Is your team working overtime?
Let me know in the comments how it's going for them.
And if your has broken the overtime habit, use the comment section to let us know how.
I read and appreciate every comment.
This video is part of a series on how to work as an agile team.
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Thank you for watching, and I'll see you next time, unless you are working overtime.