The wheel’s still turning but the hamster’s dead — the importance of frequently measuring outcomes
I was watching my five year old son playing a game of tag recently. Being an Agile geek, instead of just enjoying watching the kids having fun — which I imagine is what normal people do — I immediately started to think about how it related to software development.☺
When the game starts, the kids all start running around like crazy to avoid getting tagged. The thing is, they’d be better off staying still and observing the and then they could decide to run away if they need to. Instead they run around in random circles and end up accidentally bumping into the person who’s “it” and getting tagged.
My brain started wandering and I was reminded of a phrase I read earlier that week: “The wheel’s still turning but the hamster’s dead”. It’s a bit grim and dark, but it made me laugh! To me the phrase is saying: “Things appear to be OK and moving along, but something really wrong at the core”.
The Agile geek in me kicked in again. How many projects have I worked on in my career where the wheel was spinning but the hamster was dead? There was the e-learning application we spent a year building before we discovered very few people wanted to buy it. The web application prototyping tool that had no happy users after years of development. The eBook platform built to a bullet point list of requirements which ended up shutting down after getting few users.
At some point in all these projects, the wheel stopped and the hamster’s decayed little furry body was dragged out. As the smell filled the room, people couldn’t avoid seeing there was a problem. However, it was already too late.
I’m not the only person experiencing this either. A quick search for “IT project failures stats” gives you results which talk about 50%-70% of IT projects failing. That’s a lot of dead hamsters.
Agile Development is both the solution and part of the problem.
A wise old man once told me (he’s not actually that old) that Agile is about shortening your feedback loops.
For the projects I mentioned above, feedback came too late. The more frequently you can collect feedback about your product, the quicker you can adapt and change course — i.e. the more agile you can be. The more you adjust course, the higher the chance you’re going to hit the target. Getting back to the analogy, you need to be able to spot an unwell hamster early.
The Agile Manifesto says: “Working software is the primary measure of progress”. This is misleading. This is spinning the wheel. All those projects above had working software, but we weren’t progressing to the goal.
Achieving measurable outcomes is the primary measure of progress
You don’t need working software to achieve outcomes either. Creating feedback loops early through user research and prototypes is highly valuable too.
Try asking this simple question whenever you start working on something: “What are we hoping to achieve and how do we measure it?”. Defining the outcomes you’re looking for can be hard, but that question will get you started on the right path.
So, are you working on a project at the moment where the wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead?
