Mike Cohn's letter today speaks about distractions from the agreed upon path.
About bosses that can't stick to the plan, that change their mind when a new idea comes into their head.
Mike suggests:
... you need to make sure your boss, or whoever is behaving this way, remains mentally engaged in the feature.
This type of boss needs more frequent updates. They don't need to be formal or even written. But you need to be sure that your boss remains aware "that thing isn't done yet."
This can be as simple as casual updates when you walk past the boss's desk or see him or her in the hallway.
Long ago Alistair Cockburn used the term Information radiator when we were talking at a coffee shop in Salt Lake. Alistair BTW is one of my favorite thought leaders, always rational, never chasing the current shiny object.
This notion of an information radiator is also called Big Visible Chart. Ron Jefferies speaks of BVC's but Ron's charts seem to be more about the metrics of the projects.
These BVC's started for me in the late 70's at a defense contractor, where when yuo came into the building, showed your badge, had your briefcase inspected by the security guard, and walked down the long hallway to the bull pen we were writting FORTRAN-77 in for a missile defense radar system, there was a huge 30 foot long 10 foot high chart on the wall that showed the entire program end-to-end, and where we were as of this week and who was late and who was early, and what we were palnning on delivering in this release.
Iterative and incremental releases are NOT new to Agile. That's how missile defense radar software got out the door in 1981.
In our Software Intensive System of Systems (SISoS) world today our Big Visible Charts are about the deliverables of the project. For the Agile development parts of those project, the Product Road Map is the first BVC. Here's an example of a complex system, with increasing maturity of the deliverables moving left to right in the chart, with the dependencies of the deliverables and the work needed to produce those deliverables.
When we need to have everyone have a shared understanding of the processes used to produce those deliverables, this is a BVC we use. It hangs in the lunch room.
This notion of BVC has a long history. My personal experience started in the military, where Avoid Verbal Orders is the standard. Having hallway talks, chats over coffee and other verbal exchanges is nice for social connections between team members. But when a message of importance is needed - this is what we're going to do this week Or this is what we agree the customer wanted in this Feature or Capability, a record of that agreement in some form that stands alone from the people who exchanged words is needed.
Depending on the granularity of your business rhythm, some form of BVC chart provides visibility to everyone on what to do when. Plan of the Day is another military term that transfers very well to Project Management and especially agile software development since BVC's are the norm.
No one is confused, everyone knows their job, has been trained to deliver on that job and everyone knows what everyone else's job is. So no excuse for not doing your job, when you said you would - and everyone knows it.
