How To Speed Up Development?
Tips, Tricks and Other Ways to Make It Happen
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
In any IT project, especially when producing new software, managers often face a moment when they need to accelerate progress. The reasons for this can vary widely, but when that moment arrives, the manager should possess tools and a lean approach to speed up the development phase. Be aware, however, that some acceleration tips may come with a cost caveat. This is particularly true because many approved estimations suffer from the Superman or Superwoman effect: an optimistic bias leading people to estimate effort far below what reality demands.
Parallelised Development
It's a common approach: Want to speed up development? "How many people are on this feature? Let's just add more!" But as they say in some EU countries, "nine women don't make a pregnancy happen in one month". This perfectly illustrates that throwing more people at a set of features doesn't necessarily double or triple your results. While this can be a very successful tactic and has worked wonders before, always get an expert opinion on how much time you'll actually save by adding more people to a project. I once saw a project with so many developers on an app that they constantly interfered with each other, even causing code to be deleted from Git. An "overcrowded feature" is a real problem.
Automatise tasks
One of the most effective ways to gain time and accelerate progress is to automate tasks, especially in testing and integration. The challenge lies in the ongoing effort and initial investment required. However, if executed well, automation can pay off extensively. I've witnessed excellent DevOps strategies that saved teams countless hours of effort, streamlined numerous deployments, and eliminated many mistakes from the pipeline. Developers, like all humans, are susceptible to pressure and sometimes just want to deliver code quickly to solve a problem. Automated testing, in particular, has helped prevent many production mistakes that would otherwise consume a significant amount of time and effort to fix. Automation is a passive, sometimes unnoticeable, yet powerful way to gain speed due to its inherent ability to prevent errors in the pipeline.
Anticipate Resources
Complex projects with diverse deliverables often kick off with independent work streams. While a multi-year budget might already cover a specific number of Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) on a time and materials basis, a slow start combined with rigid deadlines frequently forces teams to accelerate development to meet their obligations.
One powerful way to pick up the pace is through budget gymnastics. This means a manager temporarily over-recruits consultants or boosts the team's FTEs by several headcounts to parallelize more work. This isn't just "adding more people" as we discussed earlier. The key difference is that this additional workforce is explicitly temporary, brought in only to accelerate development.
Budget gymnastics demands careful calculation of the effort needed for tasks and deliverables. The whole point is to parallelize work, deliver sooner, and then scale back the number of FTEs as the project nears its end. This approach safeguards future commitments and keeps overall budget consumption relatively consistent. In essence, the manager is pulling project funds forward to multiply effort and make up for lost time.
But, like a candle burning at both ends, this method means some colleagues will need to be let go once the objective is achieved. So, as you can imagine, it's absolutely vital to make it clear from day one that these new team members are a temporary workforce, onboarded specifically to help the project push forward.
Scope Review
Another powerful way to speed things up is to agree on smaller deliverables. This can be a tough negotiation, and managers sometimes feel uncomfortable with it, but at critical moments, it's absolutely crucial to focus on the lion's share of deliverables and their true added value. Resources are finite, and a project's success fundamentally relies on achieving key objectives and delivering essential components. It's common for projects to accumulate "fluff" and "nice-to-haves" that end up costing far more than the actual value they bring to the final product. If a project needs to accelerate, a highly effective alternative is to meticulously review the scope of what's being delivered and secure clear agreement from key stakeholders.
Increase the budget and resources
Sometimes, there's simply no way around it: accelerating progress demands more people or better tools. All too often, however, this isn't a simple solution but rather a symptom of a deeper issue: overly aggressive estimations and an overly ambitious approach to cost-cutting. For certain projects, this initial optimism will inevitably return to bite management later, when reality forces a starkly different perspective on the project's strategy and budget allocation.
Use of AI
The new kid on the block, AI, can truly accelerate the development of new features. While its capabilities can sometimes feel magical, developers must genuinely understand the code they are producing. A new set of AI-powered Software Engineering tools is allowing teams to speed up certain system components, and the gains are significant.
This isn't merely about decreasing the effort required to create features. It also mitigates the risk of developers becoming blocked by unforeseen complications during execution. Developers who embrace AI and have good tools at their disposal can be game-changers for a project. However, AI on its own accomplishes nothing. It still requires the magic of the developer to truly make things happen.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur