In the spring our marketing director asked for a small change to the customer portal. She wanted the quote form to ask how a customer had heard about us, so that her team could stop guessing which campaigns brought in business. My team estimated two days. She received it nine weeks later, and in the meantime she ran an entire campaign she had no way to measure.
When she raised it at the leadership meeting, I defended my team, because the estimate had been honest and the work, once started, took exactly two days. That was true, and it was beside the point. She had never asked how long it would take us to do. She had asked when she would have it.
So we measured what she had measured. For every request completed in the previous six months, we compared the days of work with the days between asking and receiving. The median request needed three days of effort and took forty seven days to arrive. The gap was widest for the smallest requests, because a small change had nobody pushing it and was always the easiest thing to put back. It waited for triage, then for an estimate, then for room in a sprint, then for a release window. Each wait was short and each had a reason. Nobody owned the total.
Our own reports showed effort, utilisation and delivery against estimate, and on all three we looked good. The business never saw any of those numbers. It saw how long it waited.
We now publish the time from request to delivery every month, by department, beside the effort it took. Changes estimated at under three days go into a separate lane staffed by two people, are estimated once, and go out in the next weekly release. We limit how many large pieces of work can be in progress at the same time, which slowed the start of new projects and noticeably sped up their finish. Small requests from marketing now arrive in about eight days.
The effort had always been reasonable. What we had never managed was the time a request spent waiting between people who were each doing their own job well. Most of what a department experiences as IT being slow is time in which nobody in IT is working on its request at all.
– Serguey Shinder
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