Many years ago, I worked with a team I still consider my greatest success. But, of course, any success I have is, in reality, the success of many other people working together. This team had the most consistent delivery rate I have ever seen. They largely achieved this by following the scrum guide's practices as dictated by the scrum guide. Of course, over time, they had inspected and adapted their processes, but they hadn’t deviated so significantly that you wouldn’t recognise good quality scrum.
The joy of becoming a consistently delivering team is that you can guarantee, with as much certainty as possible, that you will actually deliver when you said you would. In our reporting to the wider business at the end of every sprint, we would say that we have completed x stories this sprint and are committing to x-30% stories next sprint. We didn’t doubt that we could deliver x stories; we had delivered x stories for the previous 15 sprints. However, we wanted to manage our stakeholders’ perception of us, and the best way to do that was to ensure that we would at least meet our sprint commitment. Of course, it didn’t hurt that every sprint, and we also provided some of our stakeholders with some value they weren’t expecting to receive quite yet.
I’m a naturally over-confident person. My instinct is to tell people I can deliver the world to them in about the time it takes to build a small island. However, over the years, I’ve learned that this only serves to make me look bad and to upset everyone around me. Thanks to some excellent mentors I’ve been fortunate enough to have, I learned (later than I wish I had) the value of perception management.
At another gig, a boss always pushed me to commit to bigger and better numbers, regardless of the numbers I presented. Pretty soon, I started by providing a number below what I was comfortable giving and let them push me up to the number I would have happily given the first time. I only assume this made them feel like they’d been a good manager, ensuring they demanded the most from their staff. Of course, this number was still below the number I actually thought we could achieve, but leaving space for things to go wrong is always a sound bet. After all, we’re not using agile ways of working because life is simple.
When a group of people invest money they are responsible for into you, they have two needs that they will never (rarely?) say out loud. First, they need to be able to look good to their bosses / stakeholders for having made a wise investment. This is achieved by either making more money or acquiring more goods and services than they estimated could be acquired with that investment. Second, they need you to reassure them that you are the right person to have invested in. There are lots of ways of doing this, and the way I prefer is actually to deliver above their expectations.
Overall, expectations of your return on investment are set by the people making that return. For example, when you go to a bank, they tell you what the interest rate will be if you give them your money. The same principle can be used in business; when people ask you what you’re going to create with the money you’re giving them, tell them a little less than you think you can deliver so when you deliver more than you said you would, they feel good about themselves for having made such a wise decision in choosing you.
Is this lying or some deceit? Is it manipulation? Is it moral? I don’t have a good answer to these questions and struggle with them regularly. Currently, my thoughts are that I’m delivering value for my managers and giving them what they need. In my role, managers are often the users of my output. Therefore, surely it is my responsibility to deliver the value they need. I think I would prefer not to need to manage the expectations of others and be left alone to do my work, but as I’m not advocating this freedom for anyone else, how could I justify being the only beneficiary of such privilege?