Sometimes you just have to make up your mind...
Time's up! Time for release and there are so much stuff we want in the application. Supporting offline mode certainly has been costly, but we hope it's as important as we think. But it has also had the effect that everything we've done has become four times as difficult. Offline support for our business is hard and complicated. So, what has happened is that things we wanted to complete by now is not finished.
The scrum master and product owner has discussed the priorities for the September sprint for hours. Often it has resulted in a Decision. But when I have asked for details "Well, if we're going to do that won't we have to ..." and things have become more complicated and costly so the priority has dropped.
Us soon pushing into the last week of the sprint has made me seeing the inevitable: us doing all the planning the last week, again. It's not like I haven't been creating storyboards and models. It's only that when I've had a decision and started, the plans have changed.
To put it as it is: our Product Owner wants it all. An he wants it next month.
So, today I demanded an answer: I want to finish something! I know that we want A + B + C but that is not an option. And every time we change our minds, we have done some planning/modeling that is good for the future but it won't help us the first week in September. I hope I got a straight answer this time. We don´t have time for a new decision. If we don't get a cloning device or a time machine. Offline is expensive...
Labels: priority
posted by Anna Forss @ 7:26 PM
2 Comments:
"Supporting offline mode certainly has been costly, but we hope it's as important as we think."
But does it offset the costs in delaying the release? Does your company have purchase orders in hand based upon the ability to work off-line?
Is the risk of pissing off existing customers who have waited for functionality seperate from the off-line capability worth it?
Who makes these types of strategic decisions in your organization?
Tom
Yes, we just closed a million SEK deal with a large international customer demanding offline support. and it was really necessary for our other customers as well. we work with service management and up till now our customer's helpdesk has been without system if the servers are down. We are building a client like Outlook in the respect that everything created in the offline mode is queued in a "outbox" so that the orders can be made even if the system is down.
The one who's making the call right now is our CEO, but we plan to engage a dedicated product owner.
The problem with offline/online is that we didn´t understand the cost, and we probably still don´t. But now when we have started, we think it´s the right way. And sometimes that is expensive.
Our present customers use an older product suite and to make them happy and content we have dedicated a developer who only works with stabilizing that platform and introducing small but nice features.
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