Shifting Focus to Expectations Management

Setting and Managing Expectations - Mike Cohn

My first Scrum project was incredibly successful, yet it was almost a failure.
All of the technical aspects of the project were going extremely well. We were ahead of schedule, stress and scalability tests showed that we'd exceed uptime and reliability goals. Everyone on the team was having fun and doing their best work.
The problem was that user expectations had been growing faster than the functionality being developed.
The project was call center software to be used by hundreds of nurses initially, scaling to thousands. Nurses would use the system to triage patients, provide advice, dispatch emergency personnel when needed and so on.
In monthly sprint reviews with the nurse users, I was routinely shocked by what they’d come to expect, some of which wasn’t even technically feasible. With about three months left on the year-long project, I realized my focus had to change. From then on, I spent almost all of my time on expectations management.
I met with nurses in each of the call centers and described exactly what would and would not be in the delivered system. I toned down their expectations about the system’s impact on world peace, global warming, and personal weight loss.
Had I not done this, the product would have been perceived as a failure.
Since that project, I have been acutely aware of the importance of expectations management to the overall success of any project. Setting and managing expectations is perhaps even more important when an organization seeks to adopt or improve its agility.
With agile improvement efforts, I find it helpful to set and manage expectations about four things:
 

• How quickly teams will improve
• How long it will take to gain additional predictability from the team’s new way of working
• How there will almost always come a time when turning back looks easier than sticking with it
• The level of involvement in the transition that will be necessary from various stakeholders and organization leaders

By properly setting expectations you can avoid the problem of having an otherwise successful transition or project sunk by unrealistic expectations,

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