Fact-Based Management

We should be able to draw a line from delivery execution - development, implementation, infrastructure, operations - through project, programme and department level reporting. We can only do this if work being performed is properly encapsulated, trace-able and prioritized, and if the state of work (complete or incomplete) is substantially a statement of fact, as opposed to opinion.

This latter point is critical. In fact-based management, we tighten the relationship between execution and tracking by emphasizing integrity of completion. While there is still the chance of reporting the state of work as complete when in fact it is not, the probability of doing so is much lower.

In software development integrity of completion is achieved through automated testing, continuous integration, pairing and collaboration. Combined with iterative tracking, we achieve a high degree of transparency. These core practices are synergistic and reinforcing. The lack of attention to one reduces the synergistic benefits.

Fact-based planning - bringing the 4 core variables (time, people/resources, features and quality) into balance - aligns strategy with reality. It is both more transparent and highly adaptive; by definition it engenders responsiveness to changes in the business environment. This has the dual benefit of:

• reducing organizational inertia of long-running, long-return investments for which sunk costs are substituted for business case compliance; and


• reducing the uncertainty principle in business - by knowing to a greater degree of accuracy where we're at, we can take better, more confident decisions about where we're going.

The management anti-patterns - that is, when execution and management are unaligned - become similarly obvious:

• We do not engage in opinion-based planning. Asserting that things will be completed by a certain date through an exercise of top-down planning doesn't give sufficient respect to the domain and the changes it can (and most likely will) introduce. It also tends to ignore the fact that nothing happens in zero time. While this might qualify as a form of prayer, it is not management.


• We do not forego the practices that create integrity of completion in pursuit of declaring something completed. Asserting that something is "done" without subjecting it to the scruitiny of review in combination with technical and requirements testing framework mortgages the future, increasing the liklihood that we create a brownfield that will have to be remediated at a later date.

In sum, aligning execution with management creates an environment where there are no passengers in delivery. All parties own, are aligned with, and are driving to the plan, and all parties benefit from transparency.

And we don't go in mad pursuit of cramming 10 lbs of stuff into a 5 lb bag.