Struggling to get a clear sense of where you are progress-wise? You're not alone – it's a common problem. From my forthcoming book 'Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation', here's why:
In large endeavours such as product development, one important reason why progress can seem hard to evaluate is that there are many ways to break down, organise, and sequence the work – by architectural component, use case, or feature, to name just three. Once broken down, the work can be organised and sequenced in any number of ways; mathematically, the possible combinations grow factorially with the number of work items, making even exponential growth seem tame. Even if – and that’s a big if – those original structures aren’t lost to those who are working and coordinating in the “here and now” on a few items at a time, the expectations of those who made the commitments, those doing the work, and those who stand to benefit from it can easily diverge. Moreover, that’s just looking at outputs (what is produced), not outcomes (its impact)! There is a lot there to get right, and plenty of opportunity therefore for disconnects to arise.
We’ll get to some solutions shortly. To set expectations, I’m not about to argue that the answer is always more detailed contractual agreement between everyone concerned. We tried that, and it failed more often than it succeeded. We need to focus instead on the relationships involved.
[The passage I allude to in that last paragraph has been shared previously on LinkedIn – I'll link to it in the comments]
