This week in pm-clinic: painless ways to cut features?
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:
Our team has a monthly process called add/cuts, where all the head honchos get in a room, look at the feature lists, and decide what features to add and which to cut. These things are usually quite bloody, carnage heavy affairs – typically 80% cuts and 20% adds. It’s an ad-hoc meeting where we review goals, run the work item lists, and try to make things fit the schedule. Unfortunately it often falls into ritual feature killings, where each head honcho cuts things to prove to the others how hard core they are.
The result is that the meeting functions best to motivate people to finish work before these meetings (perhaps good), but also to skunk work, hiding work items, to avoid having them discussed in these meetings (which is bad).
I’m influential enough that I can propose a different way to run these feature level add/cut meetings. What should I propose?
First of all, making the features-cut decisions in a planned monthly meeting is a great idea.
Secondly, you can try to rank all the to-be-cut features based on the required human resources, time and cost. Then make a business decision based on the results of the ranking.