What we can learn from booking a meeting

You have probably had to book a meeting. Tell me if this sounds familiar....

I open up the calendar, find my perfect slot and then start adding delegates.

That's when the problems start. Of my 10 people, I try to find a slot that matches everyone's availability.

Epic fail! As hard as I try, around the date I wanted there is no 'magic' slot where everyone is available.

I have an additional problem in that some people have decided to not allow anyone to read their calendar so I have no idea when would be convenient for them. Oh well, everyone likes a surprise I guess.

The only people I have success with are those people with gaps in their calendar. People who are back to back force me to look at different options.

I also notice that people who have shorter meetings are easier to fit things around. Especially if there are gaps on either side.

The only way I can guarantee everyone's availability is to move it way, way out into the future. For this particular meeting, that's really not an option.

This is where most people would probably just book their ideal slot, giving a compelling background and agenda and adding lots of bold and uppercase writing - basically saying "You need to attend this, move stuff around!". This strategy means you expect flexibility from your delegates.

Maybe you force people to attend. You email each one explain it's not optional and that they need to sort something out. I wish I were that important.

Neither of those are an option for me, so what else could I do.

I could book this out of hours..... they would be available then, right? Failing that, I could always book over a lunchtime that is something people can be flexible with. I would of course be pure evil if I did this but as long as I provide biscuits, I might survive.

So lets look at what would make this successful:

1) Visibility - the more I can see, the better the chances of being able to find something that works for everyone.
2) Flexibility - You could see this from both parties. I need to be flexible with my dates and my delegates need to be flexible with theirs. I might find something that works for most people but some people will need to fall into line.
3) Slack - Without slots anywhere in a day, you will always have to be flexible. So slack helps. People who have planned their days from beginning to end can only disappoint others when they have to change their plans or not attend. Size is a big part of this - the shorter your meetings, the more options this creates when we also introduce slack using gaps in your calendar.

In an organisation that uses a platform model, this metaphor is close to problems with planning at scale.

To build anything, you need to align your development with other areas of the business which have other stuff going on too. It is only together that you can get something to your customer.

Differing priorities for each platform required to build a new feature can reduce flexibility.

We are often transfixed with utilisation of our development people that we fail to see the side effects of this local optimisation - in this case, it makes it even harder to get something in front of our customer. Without slack in our planning systems we offer no opportunities to adjust without making a bigger change somewhere else.

Following the metaphor, we often see long wait times as we have to wait for everyone to become available to even start. This increases leadtimes as it delays when we actually start the work.

The sizes of work also play a huge part. If batches of work are in the months size then we have to lengthy waits and it makes it even harder to align all the platforms that need to contribute. If the owners of those platforms are not flexible either, the problem gets even worse as we cannot negotiate.

We always have the option to stop in the middle of batches but we need to be aware of the waste this might create - the team will have to stop work, potentially having to maintain a branch until they can work on it again as well as loose track of where they were in that work.

As much as we would like people to just switch around, the reality is this stuff is hard and a mental model of what we are doing takes a while to form. We are human, we forget. We also loose track of how important focus is to development teams - swapping and changing types of work does not help!

In a system with a platform setup, the only way to win at planning is to start to change peoples behaviours so you have visibility, flexibility and slack in their local systems to allow better planning at an organisational level.

You could force alignment but be aware of the waste this will create in your system which will probably be hidden from sight.

Or you could simply delay work until you find the 'magic' slot :)

All of this is fantastic argument for vertically aligned feature teams which promise to solve all of these problems. I will write about these soon....