Get small things done continually

This resource first appeared in issue #104 on 11 Dec 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other, Strategy: Product/Service Management

Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects - Jade Rubick
Scatter-Gather - Tim Ottinger

One recurring issue with research computing is that we typically get funded for projects, but we’re really building products — tools, outputs, and expertise that will (hopefully) outlast any particular project.

For different reasons, Rubick strongly recommends that your team focusses on milestones rather than projects, but this change in focus can help be an intermediate stepping stone between project-based thinking and product-based thinking. He recommends defining progress in terms of milestones which are small, high-quality (e.g. not proofs of concepts), understandable, and independently valuable. His definition of milestone might a bit smaller (1-3 weeks) than makes sense in our line of work, but even 1-2 month milestones, when something can be delivered (whether it’s information or working integrated code) can be a really useful transition from focussing on the requirements of any given project to building a long-lasting product.

Ottinger focusses on a different problem with long-lived projects - work gets farmed out “scatter-gather” in a way that is hard to integrate, can lead to silos (“front end” vs “back end”, for example), and its hard for team members to see how their work contributes. Instead, Ottinger recommends a similar approach - delivering output in small unified chunks that involves significant subsets of the team working together.