Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Ensure Sufficient Capacity

“The best way to ensure we get everything we want in this release is to overload the team. This way, they won’t have any possibility of ‘down time’—every single minute of every day has to be booked solid—and we’ll stand a good chance of getting everything we want!”

Have you ever heard comments such as these? It tends to be a common sentiment among the “beat the team until morale improves” crowd. The sad truth is such an approach almost guarantees that the team will actually get less done in the same period of time than if it had what Tom DeMarco calls “slack.”⁶ The reality is that things are going to happen that you didn’t anticipate, and if you don’t have sufficient capacity to absorb the unexpected, you will get derailed. ...