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--- why_do_people_overcommit [2019/07/08 18:35] – hpsamios
+++ why_do_people_overcommit [2021/08/30 12:55] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1
@@ Line 44: / Line 44: @@
 The question is “what can we do to improve the situation?”
-There are some obvious things we can do. Firstly, we can help our Teams understand that these drivers exist and create problems for ourselves. Sometimes a simple discussion based on raising awareness will help. This is true of both the above individual as well as management factors which lead to over committing. For example:
+There are some obvious things we can do. Firstly, we can help our Teams understand that these drivers exist and that we often create problems for ourselves. Sometimes a simple discussion raising awareness will help. This is true of both the above individual and environmental factors which lead to over committing. For example:
   * Many people are unaware of the optimism bias we all have. You can make people aware of this bias by having a discussion around the [[https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Jim/prudential-the-prudential-magnets-experiment|Prudential Ad About Thinking Positive in the Future]]
@@ Line 55: / Line 55: @@
   * Management could show awareness of their fallibility by admitting to past errors and discussing how they will address going forward.
-<WRAP center round todo 60%>
+> Under-commit; Over-deliver.
-Under-commit; Over-deliver.
-</WRAP>
 We also might try a more “culture oriented” approach. For example, we could adopt a mantra like “under-commit and over-deliver”. We would set the cultural expectation that it is OK to under-commit so long as we meet the resultant expectation. Some Management will worry than this will mean that Teams will slack off. The data above shows that we do not have this problem in reality. And wouldn’t you love to be in the room when a Team reports to the customer saying “we were able to complete the committed items and, since we had spare capacity, we also delivered this high priority item you were wanting.” BTW: I have actually seen this happen.
 Often these approaches have been tried and you still find a pattern of over commitment. In these situations the Team might want to set up a single subject Retrospective to discuss approaches to improve. This might be a place to discuss the issue, raise awareness of factors, and review possible approaches. I suspect that when you ask the Team, there will be other, more specific factors and potential approaches to take.
+For example, one factor that we often see is that while overcommit data is available, it is also ignored. It’s just a number on the screen. One idea to make this more visceral is to hand out tokens which represent capacity and as people plan work, take the appropriate number of tokens away. Watch for an interesting discussion to develop when people run out of tokens and still have more demand (“we have to get this done!”)
 And finally we could also consider other more direct and experimental approaches. For example: