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INSIGHT “Less visible” supporting and leadership tasks might be at
increased risk on Agile projects, and their need might be greater and/or
required on shorter cycles.
Examples of what I mean by “less visible” supporting tasks include analysis
leading to a design decision, or analysis leading to making a priority work
decision. Examples of “less visible” leadership tasks include monitoring,
guiding, and assessing the Product Backlog at the start of each new incre-
ment. Now let me give you more information related to how this affected our
preparing Al.
8.9 More on the DART Case Study
On the DART project, we had made an initial high-level assessment concern-
ing two subsystems. We originally assessed them as low risk because we
thought they would be easy to do. I knew we hadn't done the detailed analysis
yet to be confident in that assessment. Because of the initial analysis, they
had been placed on the Product Backlog as lower priority.
We w o u l d e v e n t u a l l y h a v e t o d o m o re d e t a i l e d a n a l y s i s o n t h e s e s y s t e m s .
Unfortunately Al—who would have been the best person to do this analy-
sis—was also one of our best Java programmers and was doing a great job
keeping us on the six-month aggressive schedule by working closely with
the customer.
INSIGHT The effort of actually analyzing the Product Backlog and deter-
mining which tasks are most important for the next increment takes time
and can be critical to the overall project success.
Because he was getting so much done, I decided to leave Al with his head
down working. I didn't involve him in the assessment of the work still to be
done on the Backlog because that would have jeopardized our vision to hit
the aggressive six-month schedule goal. Al's DART teammates also thought
Al was doing a great job. Everyone thought the project was going great,
including the customer. But the fact was that Mike wasn't the only customer
representative—he just happened to be the one who was communicating
with us most frequently during the early phase of the project.
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