Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes we can do it right the first time. Other situations render this nearly impossible. Let’s understand the difference and manage accordingly.

There is an old saying that goes something like:

We don’t have time to do it right, but we seem to have time to do it twice.

Some say the origins of this go to basketball coach and philosopher John Wooden. Others say its is so old it has no originator, but is muddled in there with all the other famous sayings.

In our world of Agile development and Agile Scrummed this and that as a service, we always do it two or three times. In those cases, we plan to do it several times. These methods admit that we make mistakes, so we reserve a small amount of resources for the first time and save other resources for the second and third times.

In my experience, however, we aren’t really agile and aren’t really planning to do things several times. We make the same old mistakes and meta-mistakes and use “agile this and that” as a cover for such.

Perhaps we can “get away with” making the same old mistakes again. Perhaps we can fool ourselves into thinking that we can make the same old mistakes again. Perhaps not.

Things don’t have to be this way.

Do we have a known problem with a known solution? Plan to do it right the first time. Allocate sufficient resources with sufficient review steps to catch mistakes.

Do we have a partially known problem, i.e., an unknown problem with an unknown solution? Plan to do it several times. Usual minimal resources each time. Take advantage of the time between attempts to think.

We can do this. So let’s do it.