Ask HN: Best way to crunch 3 weeks work into 2?

2 points by kenips 9 years ago | 2 comments

Hello HN,

I'm working as a dev in a brand new startup. The team is new (but experienced) so there was some learning / setup overhead but it's now fairly minimal. We use Clubhouse so we have some insights into our velocity.

Now, base on our realistic projection we need at least 17 days before we can deliver our initial Epics. However, management could no longer wait and they have set an arbitrary deadline by the end of month. They are now asking us to work through the weekend at a remote location so we could be undistracted to deliver the work. Management thinks that the 3 days away undistracted will yield twice the productivity so the math ends up somewhat working (2 work weeks plus weekend = 12 plus 3 days with 2x output = 15 days).

I'm not entirely convinced that this is possible but management believes so. My biggest concern is that the team will not deliver twice the productivity over the weekend for 3 days and still keep up with normal productivity the week after. I'm wondering if other HN members have similar stories to share (both success and failure) and if there's any recommendation I can make to management.

PaulHoule 9 years ago |

Triple constraints: schedule, cost, scope.

The typical software team (not great at project management) would do best to attempt "least cost" development which is mostly attained by "squeezing risk" with effective planning to avoid wasted work.

Compressing the schedule past that adds risk and cost, often sharply.

Think of these things:

Is there some way you can simplify the deliverable to shave time off?

Can you outsource some of the work?

These work at the margin. If you doubled the team size you would waste time getting people up to speed. Feed 10% of work to a wizard, find 10% you can skip, so are having an impact.

Crazy work arrangements work if you have a tiny team (say 5 people) and strong morale (100% consensus that this isn't just OK but it's a gas gas gas). If anybody on the team is going to be resentful about it, however, it won't work.

How about going into a reply reduced interruption environment during the week?

matthewking 9 years ago |

The amount that your dev's will benefit from the distraction free environment depends how much they're distracted in their day to day environment, unless that's a lot then a 2x productivity increase seems unlikely, more like 1.2 - 1.3x. Stress of a tight deadline and no time to recouperate may also work against the dev's depending on how they deal with stress.

My first stance to management would have been if they want to cut the deadline, they also need to cut the features. Unless there's some kind of launch / public event this seems like a silly thing to do for the sake of 1 week!