SESSION TITLE Defying Parkinson's Law: Sustainable Development and Beyond SESSION THEME Agility SESSION OVERVIEW "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", can we afford it during a sprint? Agile team need to focus on delivering value and eliminating waste. They need to cut down the distractions and non-productive time. Pomodoro Technique along with Time boxing and paired programming can be very effective to increase productivity. Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle comes in handy when team need to prioritize their activities. In today’s competitive era, time to market is shrinking, so cycle time should be reduced and learning feedback loop needs to be speedup. In this presentation paper, an effort has been made to describe about how to manage time effectively during a sprint. It illuminates some innovative insights into areas like DoD, time boxing, task slack, WIP, task switching, pair programming, osmotic communication, disciplined delivery and value stream mapping etc. For an effective time management team can utilize Parkinson’s law to define sustainable development in their workplace. SESSION AGENDA Parkinson’s Law and Sustainable Development? Effective Time Management Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle Pomodoro Principle Cut down the distractions and non-productive time Better Agile Practices: like DoD, time boxing, task slack, WIP, task switching, pair programming, osmotic communication, disciplined delivery and value stream mapping etc. SESSION TAKEAWAYS What is Sustainable and Unsustainable development? Tasks prioritization techniques Time Management Continual refinement How to inculcate sustainable development in work culture DURATION 45 Mins

1. Defying Parkinson’s Law:
Sustainable Development and Beyond
Harpreet Singh

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My Self..
Name: Harpreet Singh
Industry Experience: 20 Years
Contact: harpreet.singh@rsystems.com
harpreet20oct@yahoo.com,
9818775067
Website: www.LearningPulser8.com
Qualification & Certifications: MCA, MBA, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM, Scrum Master Certified,
Scrum Developer Certified, Agile Expert
Certified, Scrum Study Certified Trainer.
Certified Internal Quality Auditor (CMMi),
Certified Information Security Auditor, ITIL V3 (F), Six Sigma
Green belt.

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Story of a “Good” Project Manager
´ This story is about a very good project manager who is known for handling
complex projects. He is currently handling a project of 2 months of duration.
Currently team in the end of first months.
´ Customer is asking for some minor changes. Team along with their current tasks
is in the discussion with customer about the new task. Testing team is waiting for
the code to be completed so that they can start testing
´ Senior management instructed the project manager to utilize tester and gave
them whatever functionality is complete. So tester started the testing and
started to log defects in defect tracker tools. Developer started fixing these
defects along with the development work they were doing. Team started
working extra hours to accommodate this. There are no automated Unit test
cases as developers thinks it will further slow down the development.
´ Project Manager realizes there is some problem and team is unable to deliver
on time.

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"work expands to fill the time available
for its completion"
: Cyril Northcote Parkinson

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Parkinson’s Law
´ Credit goes to Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of the first sentence of a
humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955 and since republished
online,[1][2] it was reprinted with other essays in the book Parkinson's Law:
The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958)
´ A c urrent form of the law is not the one Parkinson refers to by that name in
the article,
´ It was a mathematical equation describing the rate at which
bureaucracies expand over time as a result of closure of colonial offices.
´ Interestingly the adage “ Work expand to fill the time available for it’s
completion” become more popular than the actual law.

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Unsustainable Development
´ Myopic focus on the features in the next release, the next quarter, and
the current issues such as defects and escalations reported by
customers.
´ over- (or under-) design, a code first then fix defects later (code-then-
fix) mentality, too many dependencies between code modules
´ Lack of automated tests, and use of temporary patches or
workarounds that are never addressed.
´ Team is reactive to changes in their ecosystem and are caught in a
vicious cycle of reacting to events and
´ working harder and longer hours just like walking up a down escalator.
The result is a project Death Spiral.

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Death Spiral

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Unsustainable Development

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The Causes of Unsustainable Development
Project
Stresses
Project
Controls
Collaboration
Expertise
Decision Making
Simplicity
Cost
Management
External
Dependencies
Disruptive
Technologies
Disruptive
Business Model

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Technical Debt and the Flywheel Metaphor

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Sustainable Development
´ Achieve and maintain an optimal development pace
indefinitely.
´ Teams are able to be proactive about changes in their
ecosystem.
´ These teams are in a virtuous cycle where the more
team is able to improve themselves and how they work
together, the greater their ability to deal with increasing
complexity and change. (No fundamental Attribution
Error)

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Striving for Sustainable Development Is
Like Juggling
Features
Bug Fixing
Design
Emphasis
Working
Product
Defect
Prevention
Continual
Refinement

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Working Product
1. No "Broken Windows"
2. Be Uncompromising about Defects
3. "Barely Sufficient" Documentation
4. Continuous Integration
5. Nightly Builds
6. Prototyping (quick and dirty approach ,Throwaway, Tracer Bullet)
7. Don't Neglect Performance
8. Zero Tolerance for Memory and Resource Leaks
9. Coding Standards and Guidelines
10. Adopt Standards (Concentrate on Your Value-Add)
Working
Product

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Defect Prevention
1. Ruthless Testing
2. Use Available Tools
3. Pair Programming and Code Reviews
4. Lightweight Root-Cause Analysis
Defect
Prevention

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Design Emphasis
1. Design Vision
2. Guiding Principles
3. Simple Design
4. Refactoring
5. Design Patterns
6. Frequent Rapid Design Meetings
7. Commitment to Re-Architecture
8. Design for Reuse
Design
Emphasis

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Continual Refinement
1. Iterative Development
2. Release Planning
3. Daily Standup Meetings
4. Refactoring
5. Retrospectives
6. Coaching and Team Development
7. Make Key Matrices visible
Continual
Refinement

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Unsustainable to Sustainable
Development
´ Start ruthless testing by emphasizing unit tests for new code and, if you can, by
putting safeguards in place such as system level tests to catch regressions
sooner.
´ Introduce simple design and refactoring.
´ If you aren't already doing so, make sure your product is built nightly
(completely, from scratch) and that you are using a configuration
management system.
´ Pay attention to your design practices. If you do a lot of up-front design
currently, don't stop doing design because you don't think it's agile. Don't get
hung up on simple design and emergent design. Start with frequent rapid
design meetings and architectural reviews.
´ Start collecting some metrics to find out what kind of defect trend and backlog
you have. This will help plan your next steps to help get defects under control.

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Time Management: Time Robbers
´ Procrastination
´ Overreaching
´ Unnecessary Travel
´ Email and paperwork
´ Timewasting Meetings
´ Distractions and Switching Cost
´ Time Wasting Boss

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Time Management: Pomodoro
Technique
´ developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s
´ The "Pomodoro Technique" is named after the
tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used
when he was a university student
´ Decide on the task to be done
´ Set the pomodoro timer to n minutes (traditionally
25)
´ Work on the task until the timer rings; record with
an x
´ Take a short break (3–5 minutes)
´ After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30
minutes)

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How do you spend time?
Making Activity log Helps in:
´ Make a realistic estimate of the time spend during the day on job orders
´ Pinpoint the critical areas:-time spend on low value jobs
´ Finding the high yielding time of our day

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Eisenhower's Urgent/Important
Principle
Quadrant-1
Important and
Urgent
Crises &
Deadline
Problems
Quadrant-2
Important But Not
Urgent
Relationship
planning and
Recreation
Quadrant-3
Not Important But
Urgent
Interruptions,
Meetings, Activities
Quadrant-4
Not Important Not
Urgent
Time Wasters
Pleasant Activities
Trivia

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Eisenhower
´ Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president of the
United States from 1953 until 1961. Before, he had been
general in the United States Army and served as the
Allied Forces Supreme Commander in World War II. He
later also became NATO first supreme commander.
Dwight had to continuously make tough decisions on
which of the many tasks he should focus on each day.
This finally lead to inventing the world-famous
Eisenhower principle, today helping us to prioritze by
urgency and importance.

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Priority

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Sustainable Development Culture
´ Disciplined
´ Responsible
´ Leadership
´ Visionary and Tactical
´ Shared Sense of Urgency
´ Highly Collaborative
´ Complementary Talents and Skills
´ Continually Improving and Learning
´ Change Tolerant
´ Risk-Aware
´ Fun

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Conclusion
´ Team needs to be proactive to changes in their eco system to manage
time.
´ Defects prevention techniques needs to be used effectively so as to focus
on features rather than struggling with defect fixing.
´ Pomodoro’s Techniques is helpful in moving things forward case of
disruptive environment.
´ Some non productive activities can also be prioritize using Eisenhower
matrix.
Following above techniques team can defy Parkinson’s law and do
sustainable development.

27. Thank You
Harpreet Singh
Question?