Waiting Is the Hardest Part
It’s right there in Tom Petty’s song: “Waiting is the hardest part.” But Tom got it wrong: starting is the hardest part.
Everyone from Alexander Pope to Elvis points out that fools rush in while wise folk wait (Elvis gets right to the point, while Pope takes considerably longer). And who could fault a team, timid ScrumMaster, or tentative manager for sounding the depths before diving in and doing what needs to be done?
Well, Ron Jeffries can. In his book and presentations, Ron says don’t wait—start reaping benefits (and revenue!) early by getting working product into the market now, before your competitors do. My colleague Skip Angel exhorts teams to “just do it.” And my own experiences with watchful waiting have shown me the rear end of many opportunities that didn’t just knock once, but found another door when I was slow in answering. So why do so many of us, knowing what we do, still hesitate to start, whether it’s start a sprint, start a project, or start telling the truth.
Maybe it’s because we’re afraid.
I was listening a week ago to a presentation Diana Larsen gave at SolutionsIQ when I suddenly sat up straight. “We only learn at the uncomfortable edges,” she said, and I was launched back into a time a few years ago when I was working with a team to deliver a functional overhaul of a B-to-B e-commerce Web site.
The product manager and I (the program manager) wanted to use Scrum for the project, but the development manager, who managed all the members of the team, was reluctant, and insisted on using what had worked for him before. What had worked before was a mish-mash of upfront planning, seat-of-the-pants estimating, and Microsoft Project-assisted project tracking. The tracking wasn’t really tracking, though; each time something didn’t happen as predicted, Project just kept telling us how much faster we’d have to work to hit the non-moving deadline for delivery).
The three of us were responsible for providing input to an executive dashboard that expressed the status of projects using the familiar red-yellow-green traffic lights. Each week, we peered intently at the Project sheet, which the dev manager had printed out on three sheets of paper that he taped together. After a handful of week, we knew that the project had drifted into red territory. Each week, the dev manager said that he thought that, with a little more effort and a bit of luck, we could get back on track. Each week, we were willing to believe something that we wanted to believe. And so each week, all three of us agreed to ignore our misgivings and doubts and delay reporting the project status as red. Until one week, more than half the way into the project, something happened.
Stay tuned to hear the rest of the story.
Feeling Agile 
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