Pushing Work to Teams Vs. Pulling

Pushing vs pulling work: stop trusting an unreliable narrator.

Lots of companies push work into their teams, either through their roadmap, OKRs, big room planning, or some other mechanism.

Then, if teams do Sprint Planning the wrong way, even more work is pushed in.

And then we're surprised they don't complete all their work, while we shouldn't be.

We know this doesn't work from personal experience. We are super hungry and because of this we put too much food on our plate we can never finish. Our eyes are bigger than our stomach: We let our hunger push too much food on our plates we will never finish.

We put how much food we'd *like* to finish in the driver's seat, instead of how much we actually *can* finish.

The alternative is gradually adding to your plate as you're eating, buffet-style. Everything on your plate is usually finished.

Don't let your hunger (or the hunger of management) dictate how much work teams put on their plate.

Let the reality of the work dictate how much you put on your plate.

Seems simple, but let's break down what usually happens:

Pushing work -> Too High Work In Progress -> Less work being completed

When you batch push work per quarter, you're placing your trust in an unreliable narrator: the accuracy of your estimates.

No matter what you do, your estimates will be wrong, so batch push per quarter actually means you're intentionally creating a traffic jam of work every quarter.

You're setting your teams up for failure from the start.

Don't trust your estimates. Pull work and let the reality of how much work it really represents dictate how much work you will pick up.

Pulling work -> Possibility of limiting WIP -> More work will be completed

Don't chase the illusion of potentially completing more work. Focus on putting yourself in pole position to complete as much work as possible.

Subtle change, big difference.

If your estimates are inaccurate, go for pull instead of push.

Counter-intuitively, commit to less work to complete more work.

And to make it even more meta: completing more work is never the goal but if everybody is stressed and overworked due to high WIP you can forget about innovation and experimentation as well.

You’ll be a slow Feature Factory at best.