Phenomena
A team working on a project is a system. We can map the inputs and outputs to responses and behaviours. One such behaviour is the reaction to news about the project’s status. Even though the team is made of humans, they cannot see all the aspects of the project without taking advantage of the right tools to view it. The news about the status is input, that is, phenomena the team can react to.
If you think about our customs for observing progress, you will realise none of the indicators are visible from the outside. The metrics all require you to collect and collate data before estimating. And that’s when you’re working on a project where you deliver early and often. The visibility of progress on large projects with up-front design is low. Progress isn’t a series of phenomena; even if it were, you’d still only know how many there were once you were done. It’s foolish to assume you can come to a reasonable conclusion about the genuine progress made towards a distant goal. In 2021, I believed I would finish writing this book in 2022.
Estimating or calculating the amount of effort put in is easy. You can easily count how many people are currently working. You can calculate hours spent on a project. You can see how many tickets are closed. The measure of effort is evidence-based. You can measure it in cash spent on remuneration if you wish. Even if some people are slow and others fast, the overall effort is measurable.
But progress is only loosely related to effort. Therefore, using effort as an indicator means we don’t have the correct feedback to learn how to progress more effectively while we’re in the middle of the work. We need the right tools to be aware of invisible project attributes such as progress, but we also need tools and lenses through which we will look to gather other information relevant to our work. These tools should provide us with phenomena to which we can react.
A lack of phenomena can be considered a form of blindness. Using ‘can we ship it?’ as our metric creates an easy-to-use measure for progress. It’s a very rough one, but it’s still something. We’re no longer blind. When you estimate you are ninety per cent of the way through a project but don’t believe there is a product hiding in what you have produced so far, it makes for an anxious sense of urgency. That urgency is only present if there are phenomena to sense.
Consider also the types of problems you might like to have, such as too many users to support. Your network goes down because you are at a thousand per cent capacity; more people are using your service than you expected. When you fail to track these things, they can become problems you wish you didn’t have. Why didn’t you react to the situation before it became a problem? It’s probably due to the lack of a phenomenon. If your servers running payment processing go down due to a deluge of people trying to buy from you, it’s a good sign but a bad state to be in. You’ve got a lot of phenomena to work with, but it’s too late to rake in the cash.
Then there’s the blindness to slow changes—the frog in a boiler syndrome. You can’t react to something that changes so slowly that you don’t notice when things get far out of hand. This blindness is sometimes referred to as a shifting baseline. The idea is that local recent deviations are so minor as to cause no ripples or resistance. Then, those measurements become the new baseline against which you compare future data. Slowly, the baseline moves into the zone that would previously have triggered a response. It’s the reason why we sometimes leave it too late when it comes to earthquake and volcano warning systems. The phenomena indicating the future explosion hide in plain sight by moving so slowly that they do not trigger any senses.
When you monitor the right things, you can predict any of these situations before they happen. But when you don’t expect something, you don’t watch for it, so you cannot know about it. By default, all the things we think are impossible are invisible to us and, in turn, we do not worry about them. So, even though we don’t want to be blind, sometimes we don’t even know what we can’t see.