Lets just try it

Years ago, a client said, “Let’s just try it for a month and see how it goes.” That week, I had a drink with my former boss, and he said, “Oh, that’s a trick. He knows it’s harder to change the process BACK but easier to sell it this way. You got played.”

My former boss was spot on. The change was to go from async Slackbot standup reports to synchronous Zoom meetings. Several years later, not only did we still have Zoom standups, but many on the team had daily and a couple of weekly ones. It contributed to a lot of context-switching and slowed down the project noticeably and immediately.

It is not my intention to rail on meetings. That’s for another, much longer blog post!

We’ll just leave this in for a couple of sprints

Another team I worked with needed a one-off feature flag for a rush request from an important client. Instead of implementing a real feature flag system or using a third-party service, we were asked to hack in a Django setting for this particular customer’s unique ID with the promise it would be removed, or we would implement some real feature flagging “in a couple of sprints.”

You know where this is going. The one-off flag was still there years later and was there when the project was scrapped due to not hitting its goals. However, it didn’t meaningfully impact the project in any way.

But trying things is good…

Yes, trying new things in an effort to improve is necessary and the basis for all real progress. The hard part is having the fortitude to push back on changes that don’t work.

The harder part is being able to tell the difference in the first place.

Research shows that it takes about 21 days to form a new habit. Once solidified into a habit, it takes effort to overcome the inherent inertia of the new process. Conversely, trying something for a day or two can easily yield misleading information. You could have done more yesterday because of better sleep and not your new fancy issue tracker labeling system.