Why your development teams deliver unpredictably

You’re probably working with developers who are clearly busy, engaged and doing their best. Yet you may still notice that it’s difficult to give a clear answer about when the work will be finished. That’s no coincidence. The issue isn’t their dedication or competence, but how their time is protected.

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Planning remains difficult

Many development teams work on multiple applications at the same time. Production issues must be addressed immediately. Priorities shift, team members change and in between there are holidays, upgrades and dependencies on other parties. On paper, there is a plan. In practice, that plan often proves difficult to maintain.

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The result is a loss of overview: what is actually being worked on right now, and what isn’t? Developers end up spending a lot of time on things that do not directly create value. In other words: wasted hours. Why? Because time is spent switching. Switching between priorities, expectations and contexts.

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Paying for nothing

That work is invisible, but it isn’t free. Take an external developer, let’s call him Pete. At the start of a project, he estimates that his task will take three days. During the execution of the work, he is repeatedly asked to “quickly” solve another issue. After every interruption, Pete has to switch back to his original task. And that takes time: time to understand where he left off, time to regain focus and time to get back into the flow.

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This is time that produces nothing; it only costs money. Yes, time is also spent solving those issues. But the real waste lies in the constant switching back and forth. At the end of the project, Pete needs half a day more than estimated. Not because he worked slowly, but because his time was never protected.

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When promises are hard to keep

As long as no one safeguards the agreed work, structural unpredictability emerges. Not only in delivery dates and costs, but also in direction and trust. The business learns that IT is not a reliable partner, while IT sees that it cannot keep the promises it makes.

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In that context, working harder doesn’t help. More pressure only increases the switching. And therefore the waste.

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Regaining trust

A plan only works when there are clear agreements about what developers commit their time to. A rhythm in which it is clear what will be picked up and what explicitly will not. You achieve this by being clear about what time may be spent on and who protects those agreements.

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At Squad Apps, I help you with exactly that: by diagnosing where work unintentionally leaks away and by establishing agreements together that make a predictable rhythm possible. So that you, as a decision-maker, can once again say with confidence when something will be finished.

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We don’t help you build faster. We make sure building actually works again.