Everything is nearly done
The same features have been ninety per cent complete for six weeks. Ninety per cent usually means the hard part has not been started, and nobody has been asked which part that is.
Fig. 01 — keep it on trackRetainer · 1 slot open
Keep it on track when nothing is shipping.
The standups still happen. The board still gets its update. Nothing has gone live in two months and nobody will tell you plainly why.
Sometimes that is the team. More often it is that nobody senior is making the calls only a technical person can make, so everything queues behind them. I take the technical direction off your plate and stay accountable for what ships.
Fig. 02 — what drift looks like
From where you sit, it usually shows up as one of these.
You cannot get a straight answer on when
The date moves by a week, every week. Nobody will commit to one, because nobody has been made to own it.
Every problem belongs to somebody else
The agency blames the platform, the platform blames the data, and the data comes out of a system nobody owns. Each of them is telling you the truth about their part.
You are being asked to decide things you cannot decide
Technical questions arrive in your inbox with no recommendation attached. You are picking between options you have no way to judge, and then you carry the blame for the choice.
Fig. 03 — what I do about it
In roughly this order, starting the week I come in.
01
Find out what is actually happening
The first fortnight goes on sitting with the people writing the code. What is in the way is usually well known inside the team and has never reached you in a form you could act on.
02
Make the decisions that are waiting
Architecture, sequencing, what comes out of scope. Most stalled builds are stalled on a handful of technical calls that nobody in the room is in a position to make.
03
Get something shipping again
Something small and real, in front of users, quickly. A team that has not shipped in months has stopped believing it can, and that is the part that has to be fixed first.
04
Be the one accountable
One person answers for what ships and for what does not. You get a straight account of where it is, in language you can take to the board without translating it.
05
Leave the team able to run it
The point is not to become permanent. A team that can hold its own direction, and a business that can tell whether it is working, is the outcome I am aiming at.
Fig. 04 — how it worksJonathan Gill
I grew the technology team at Watchfinder to more than twenty-five people, including a development team of sixteen, and ran it through the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 years and the Richemont acquisition. I have run teams that were shipping and teams that had stopped.
I hold one slot at a time. I stay hands-on: I read the code, and I will write some of it where that is the quickest way to unblock somebody.
Your team keeps their jobs. I am not there to replace anybody, and a team that has been badly led is usually a good team with nobody answering their questions.
If nobody can say exactly what is wrong yet, start with working out what to do. If there is no team and the thing simply needs building, I can build it.
Fig. 05 — get in touch
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