How to make sure that momentum is kept after a major development milestone?

Question

My team (4 people) have just reached a major milestone in our development, putting us at about 2/3 finished, but I guess the stress has caught up to everyone and all the gears have ground to a near halt, progess is being made at 1/5 of the original speed. I wanted to ask the SO community how to best deal with this, I've identified the following problems.

• Lack of clear focus and direction. We seem to be hitting small side improvements, but not working towards anything central to the project so I think that's causing a lack of enthusiasm.

• Coming down off of a very strong development push. This seems to have made everyone want to really "relax" which is fine for a bit, but progress still needs to be made.

• The remaining tasks are more tedious than glamorous. This is the nature of the beast but I have yet to tame it effectively.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Some downtime is necessary after reaching major milestones. People need to relax and decompress. Pushing on just carries the stress and fatigue forward and the team won't be working anywhere near their potential.

Give everyone a couple days to a week off and let them come back fully refreshed and ready to continue.

Answer 2

Tell them you only need 3 people to finish the project.

Answer 3

I think the key is when you say the remaining tasks are more tedious than glamorous. Yep life is like that but many developers don't want to work on tedious. None the less as the lead, it is your reponsibility to determine what tasks need to be done and assign them to people to do. Same as with the more interesting tasks, maybe even more important (someone will almost always step up to do the interesting stuff, not so much with the tedium).

So assign your tasks, give them their deadlines and follow-up on the progress they are making. If you have any of the more interesting tasks left, don't let anyone have one of those to do until he or she has completed his share of the tedium. In fact dangle the interesting tasks left as a reward for getting the tedium done faster or doing the most of it.

If you don't have any more interesting tasks left, thn maybe you can generate some competition to get the rest of the stuff done.

It's ok to be slack for a few days after a major push, but if it lasts more than a week, I think you need to get the team together and talk about what needs to done to fix the slacking.

Answer 4

Do something, other than work, as a team. Go to lunch, happy hour, laser tag, anything you can do as a group that is not work. A short break from stress can be a huge relief, and hopefully can reenergize your team for the final push.

Answer 5

I also strongly believe in "slackweek". If the deadline for the entire project isn't too close: just let everyone do what they want for a period of time. Could be write some tests here, align some stuff in the gui, read up on the latest in bla, whatever. Up to you if it has to be work on that specific project or just something useful overall.

THEN, you have a big "launch" meeting where you talk vision and goals for the remaining third - big picture stuff, and get everyone aligned again. I'm assuming the stuff left is really needed to give the customer a complete product so that it can be motivated for.

Good luck!

Answer 6

Add an easter egg! It doesn't improve the core project, but it helps give developers a sense of ownership.

Also, it can be helpful to set aside time for "pet peeve" cleanup. This gives developers a chance to fix nagging issues that are important to them. This helps improve the project, and at the same time allows the developer to make progress with something that is important to them. It helps keep the excitement level up.

Answer 7

Are there clear deadlines/milestones coming up soon? That would be something to consider as having a target date can help provide some focus.

The momentum being lost, does it tie back to people just being burned out, not as motivated as they were before or the work becoming much different, e.g. working out specifics on vague requirements rather than the cool parts that are done now?

Answer 8

One of the things Agile gets you is a finer focus on where you stand, what you've done, and what's left to do, within the next few weeks. There are concepts of "backlog" (what has to get done) and "velocity" (how fast are things getting done). Since each iteration is typically about a month, it's very clear to see when the team is not working at the projected/required rate, or working too hard. You might be able to borrow some concepts from Scrum for these purposes.

A more straightforward solution is to remind them that if they keep working at a reasonable pace, there's no end-of-milestone crunch time that makes everyone's life hell.