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Next is a section about expectations. David and Andrew mention that we should always try to go beyond expectations. I think its a common practice to “under promise and over deliver”. Be gentle in what you promise so you can make sure you can deliver and go beyond that, sometimes far beyond what you deliver. Have you ever run into a situation where you estimated some feature to be like a month of work but once you got started you had this epiphany, this burst of inspiration, and were able to create a far more efficient solution. I’ve run into this a couple of times. I remember a case where we needed some way to create branches and recursion is what normally was a linear workflow. I thought it would cost me at least 2 weeks to get this done in a technically sound and backwards compatible way. In the end I was able to implement this feature is about 2 days and it worked very well.
Communicating Expectations
Part of managing expectations is communication, and lots of it. It’s a fundamental part of agile workflows. Without active communication your agile project will probably fail. This is because your stakeholders will come to you with an idea. But this idea may be inconsistent, technically impossible and incomplete. Then there’s also this effect of the potential they see once the project is going on for a couple of cycles. Once they see some part of the project and get inspired, the scope creep begins. We’ve discussed scope creep in depth before so you can go back to a previous blog to recap on that.
David and Andrew mention that they don’t like the terminology of “managing expectations” because it sounds somewhat elitist. It sounds like a process of control. We should not control the hopes and wishes of our customers, but instead we should work with them and find common understanding to create something they truly want. So we don’t want to be dominating the conversation. A two way stream of information is what we want and what agile workflows will always promote. I think Andrew and David make a great point here. Managing expectations does indeed sounds a bit elitist. But I do think that we should properly educate stakeholders on technical or maybe regulatory limitations.
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