Tight Feedback Loops

Feedback loops need to be tight. By tight I mean clear and short. When they get lossy and take forever – everyone does a poor job. It doesn’t matter if this is a research project that was a result of meeting, or a client-facing project. These are both feedback loops. One starts and ends internal, the other starts and ends with the client. The longer the project takes the more times you have to go back to the client and re-assure them “No really, everything is fine“. The longer the loop the more work you need to do to maintain the status quo.

To make a bad analogy, look at DSL lines. You can only get them if you are close enough to the central office. Why? The signal dissipates after a certain length and it becomes unusable. It is lossy and long. Some ISPs have lengthened that distance by placing very expensive repeaters to lengthen the life of the signal. But it does not come without serious cost and there is still a limit on how far you can go. People are the same way. The signal dissipates the longer the loop goes on.

For some strange reason, manglement thinks that just pushing deadlines out further is a solution. But this only increases the feedback loop. It is why Scrum, by definition, will not go longer than a month – they realize anything longer requires way too much work to keep rolling. The solution is pushing the deadlines in closer, and only working on that one project until it is done. Don’t multi-task, focus on a single task. You will get more projects done over the span of a year doing it this way. And the clients would be happier, the projects would have less issues, and your teams would get along better (since these are the things that really matter here).