Time boxing releases

This year has been great for us as an application development organization especially when it comes to project delivery. Most of our projects were delivered on time and on budget. You may be wondering how is that possible? Here is the trick..

Many factors contributed to the success. However, I attribute a great part of that success to two things: time boxed releases and intact teams. All our projects are now not more than three months long. When we start a new project, we set the expectation with the project team and the stakeholders that this project cannot go one day more than three months. This does a lot of good things. Since we know the burn rate of the team, the budget is fixed. The only thing that is negotiable is scope. Time boxing forces sponsors to prioritize the stories/requirements, and this makes sure that only high business value stuff gets done. So at the end of the project usually sponsors are happy because their high priority stuff got done. In the past these projects used to go on for ever until the sponsors exhausted their list, which includes nice-to-have stories. This also overcomes procrastination, sharpens the focus and increases motivation for the team.

Having said that, the key for teams is how they communicate this to the sponsors. If you tell them that we are going to pull the plug after three months, that usually creates panic and unnecessary push back from them. Instead, I would tell them that as an app dev organization we have decided to time box all our projects to three months. If you have highly critical requirements that wont fit into this release, we can have another release/project immediately following the first one. That kind of message usually does the trick and I have seen it work for many of our teams.

Some would say that this will work only for maintenance projects. In fact some of our teams have made this work for large greenfield projects. We broke those projects into three month chunks and made sure that the team delivers working software while adding some business value.

Have you tried anything similar?