Lakshya

Product & Delivery · Chapter 5 of 8

Dependencies, critical path and honest status

The core of delivery work: knowing which of six teams can actually move the date.

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With six workstreams, most of them are not on the critical path at any given moment. Treating them all equally is how a programme manager becomes a status collector.

SIX TEAMS, ONE DATE — AS A LIST, THEN AS A GRAPH as a status list, all six look equal: ABCDEF as a graph, only three decide the date: ACFBDE A → C → F is the critical path B, D and E have slack A weekly sync where six teams report in turn is five teams listening to things that cannot move the date.
As a list, all six look equal. As a graph, only three decide the date. Attention spent on the workstreams with slack does not move delivery, and a weekly round-robin sync is five teams listening to things that cannot affect them.

Why status reporting is unreliable, and what to use instead

Green is the socially safe answer until it is undeniably false, so it is the least informative signal available. What to watch instead:

  • Has anything been delivered and accepted by the team downstream? Not ‘in progress’, not ‘ninety percent’ — percentage complete is unfalsifiable and hovers at ninety for weeks.
  • Have the handoff dates moved since last month? Silent drift in a dependency date is the clearest leading indicator there is, and it shows weeks before anyone declares a problem.
  • Is scope shrinking quietly? Teams protect dates by reducing what they deliver without announcing it. The date is then met and the thing is smaller.
  • Is unplanned work rising? If a team's capacity is being consumed by escalations, the plan is already invalid whatever the status says.

Ask a different question

Not “are you on track?” but “what would have to go wrong for you to miss this, and how likely is that?”

People will discuss risk far more readily than they will change a status colour, because the first is a conversation and the second is an admission. Your job is to make amber socially safe — a programme where nobody reports amber until week eleven is not a well-run programme, it is a badly-lit one.

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