Define Your Deliverables

Originally published in Forbes Tech Council

Quality development takes time. But when you’re short on that particular resource, having a few tricks to speed up the process can be invaluable.

Stick to Your Scope

The most important part of development is defining the deliverables and sticking to them.

Changing deliverables and moving the goal line will delay the project, increase costs and kill team morale. This is one of the most common ways projects go off the rails - not because the team is slow, but because the target keeps moving.

Change requests and bug fixes are inevitable. However, if the change is not related to a bug or security hole, ship the code on time and make the change in a future sprint.

This discipline is hard to maintain. Stakeholders will always have “one more thing” they want to add. Engineers will see opportunities for improvements along the way. The temptation to expand scope is constant.

But the fastest development process is one with clear boundaries. When everyone knows exactly what “done” looks like, they can focus their energy on getting there instead of wondering if the definition might change tomorrow.

Say yes to new ideas - but put them in the backlog for the next iteration. Protect the current sprint’s scope like it’s sacred, because in many ways, it is.