Small Changes Can Work Miracles

I am working on a monstrously large project.  Hundreds of developers, project professionals, quality assurance people, and executives are involved in the daily grind of releasing the product.  Being a small gear in a giant machine that builds software is humbling.  You spend much of your time waiting for others and making sure you are being helpful rather than a hindrance.  It is easy to become discouraged because you are an alone person lost in an army of developers.  Today, I want to point out where everyone on a project makes a difference, continuous improvement. 

Large enterprise projects are an endurance exercise.  You are toiling away, hauling huge stones to fit in place for the benefit of others.  The work carries on for years, and while you have deadlines to meet, you do not receive an opportunity to view how the collective group is doing.  I feel like the numerous extras in the Cecile B. DeMille film "The Ten Commandments." It looks like the antithesis of agile, with ponderous progress dictated by supervisors and pharaohs from afar.  

From a distance, gigantic projects look ponderous and top-down.  The agilist comes into the picture when they motivate groups of smaller teams to work together more closely and individual units to improve.  Pyramids take time to build, but the stones can fit together more efficiently, the joints can be tighter, and the worksite can be safer so that the workers eventually have a chance to return to their families.  It happens when you concentrate on making minor improvements often.  

For instance, the most significant delay in my team meeting the definition of done was waiting for test data creation by quality professionals.  After some discussion during a retrospective, the group agreed to create test data without relying on the quality professionals.  It took two sprints of effort, but the development team is moving faster and improving quality because they do not have to wait on other groups like quality to complete their actions. 

Small changes make a massive difference if they happen regularly and over time.  Eventually, these changes act like compound interest over time, increasing the product's value and the team.  For example, if you have a three-week sprint cycle and the team improves its throughput by one percent each sprint by the end of the year, the team will have cumulatively enhanced by 17%, which gets people promoted in the corporate atmosphere.  

The agile focus on empirical measurements of progress and attention to improvement is how big projects succeed.  If each area improves, it acts as a multiplier across numerous teams.  Managers will copy the success of others so that others adopt your improvements to become the improvements of the entire organization.  

Yes, giant projects feel like being one of the many enslaved people building the Egyptian pyramids.  However, if you focus on continuous improvement and helping others succeed, the toil is more pleasing.  

Until next time.