Commit to a Project

Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition — by Johanna Rothman (29 / 136)

👈 Decide to Commit, Kill , or Transform the Project | TOC | Kill a Project 👉

When you commit to a project, it’s a real commitment, not a partial commitment. Here’s what a real commitment means: that until you make another conscious portfolio decision, you commit to funding this project. You commit to assigning the necessary people to the project — and only to this project. If the project needs something else (space, capital equipment, desks, whatever), you commit to delivering that to the project.

When managers don’t fully commit, they revisit their projects again and again. This creates both management debt and project technical debt. They also create capacity debt because people (managers and technical) can’t improve their capabilities when they’re overburdened with too much work.

Recommitment Is Easy Now

by Sam, Scrum Master

Sam

We just finished our management review with senior management. Now that we’re using agile, we take only about five to ten minutes to explain our status in the meeting. We just show them our velocity and a demo. I let them know about project-level obstacles. Management calls them risks — which is fine with me.

Our management meets with us only quarterly, because our market isn’t changing that fast, so quarterly is fast enough. But it takes me only about ten minutes to prepare. The hardest part is noting what has changed in the product since the last time we demo’d. Once we demo and show our velocity data, management recommits to this project, assuming there is more valuable work on our product backlog.

Before we moved to an agile life cycle, it took us a full week to prepare for the meeting, and then our management took hours and sometimes days to decide whether we should finish a project.

A commitment to an ongoing project is not a blind commitment. If the project requires two DBAs and you have only one available because the other is on another project, think about your options. You might

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