You Say “Later”, They Hear “Never” [Tanya Berezin]

I don’t have a crystal ball but this I can see without one. If you manage software development projects, this will happen on your next one:

• Customers (or Marketing or Product Management) will want more than your team can deliver.
• It will be your job to tell them that.
• They won’t be happy.

You’ll need to deal with the immediate issue of salvaging your release and the longer term need to reestablish your credibility with the customers.

The immediate problem usually is somewhat straightforward. If you cannot get more resources - time, people, money, tools, etc. - and you cannot compromise quality, you’ll have to work with your customers to cut some planned features. Once you agree on what gets cut, they’ll want to know when the cut features will make it into the product. And, sometimes silently and sometimes out loud, they’ll wonder if these features will ever make it in.

You can’t blame them for being suspicious: they’ve had to postpone features on other projects before and in many cases these features never got implemented at all. But you need to tackle this concern quickly and persuasively, or negotiating scope again in the future will be much, much harder.

I will assume the features you postponed are worth implementing. (See my previous post on how to artfully say “no” to unnecessary work.) How will you assure your customers that you are only delaying the work, not burying it permanently?

1. Show the backlog.

Use your project backlog, product roadmap, or another list that shows planned features in priority order. (You don’t have one? Put one together as soon as you can.) Your customers worked with you on it, so pull it out and remind them what you were thinking of when you prioritized the list. If the business context has changed, now is a very good time to review and change this list. If not, your customers will be reminded that you were planning all along to add features over time and that hasn’t changed.

2. Discuss risks.

Acknowledge that reality can intervene with your best intentions. Your project could lose the backing of your sponsor; a new competitor could show up and you’d have to change what you are doing; or any of hundreds of other things quite outside of your control could happen. (For a list of typical project risks go to www.construx.com and navigate to the Resources & Tools section.) Show your customer your top risks list (you have one, right?) and your contingency and prevention plans for each. This will reassure them that you are doing all you can to protect the planned features from being permanently on hold.

3. Deliver.

Of course, the best thing you can do to maintain your credibility is to deliver what you promise. So when you do cut scope for one release, don’t overpromise for the next one. Keep track of what you estimated your team could do and what they actually did and improve your estimates over time.

This way, next time you say “later” to a feature, your customers won’t hear “never!”

Tanya Berezin is a successful software development leader who consistently delivers complex, bet-the business, need-it-yesterday projects. She enjoys building high-performing teams who delight customers with easy to use products. Find more information about her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/tanyaberezin