Multitasking is killing many of the projects I'm currently coaching. Team members literally have 3, 4 or even as many as 5 projects going at once. Teams are formed with multiple members, each on multiple projects. In almost every case, where there's heavy multi-tasking the teams choose to have their daily standup two times per week. Catch that - daily standup, only twice per week...
And when we hold the standups there are many, many instances of team members coming to the standup with a report that goes something like this: "I haven't had a chance to work on this project, because we had to push a fix to production. I should be able to pick up work on this project tomorrow." Our burndown charts basically look flat for several days in a row. The teams choose to have 4-week iterations because they know they won't have enough time in 2 weeks to get much done.
This is killing us in two primary ways. First, the obvious issue is not having dedicated team members to consistently apply effort to the user stories planned for the iteration. The second big issue is that a sense of complacency has descended upon the teams and the team members. It's such a common occurrence to hear that someone was busy with something else, that nobody cares to attempt to change it. It's just the way it is here and they feel they just have to work with it.
I hate to tell them, it doesn't work. I tell them, but some don't believe it's an issue. We do exercises that show it doesn't work, but they still stick to "it's just the way it is." If I could change a couple of things at this engagement, I would eliminate most, if not all, multi-tasking, form dedicated product/feature teams and prioritize projects to limit the number of projects in-flight. My expectation would be that this alone would make a huge difference on productivity and time-to-market regardless of the methodology we used.
Stop Multi-tasking.
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