A few months ago I did (along with the other partners at Fudge) a talk at Northern Digitals about a project that went wrong. It was the worst six months of work we'd ever been through. Sounds dramatic, but it's true.

As far as I'm concerned, most of the problems we encountered were caused by the 200 page functional spec that we laboured over for months. As far as we knew, the client understood and agreed to everything we proposed to build. We had a signature after all. We were very wrong.

The project that went wrong made me re-think our approach to project management, design and build. Everything really. The biggest impact from my perspective came from the adoption of the empirical approach to planning that Scrum provides.

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The same goes for designers/developers.

At Fudge, we trust everyone to do the best they can. We also trust them to tell us how long they think something will take, and how difficult it’s going to be.

Something that we try to avoid, is putting pressure on our teams to deliver more than they think is possible. It doesn’t matter how loud you shout, if something’s going to take a long time, apart from assigning more resource to the task, there isn't much you can do about it.

We also try (unless it’s life of death), to keep our working days at a reasonable length. Forcing people to work an extra three hours a day, isn’t going to result in an extra three hours of quality work.

At Fudge, the days of the “hero programmer” ended as soon as we implemented Scrum (Google it). We don’t want people to grudge coming to work because they had stay late the night before. They won’t be motivated and they won’t be productive.

Here's a description of the type of situation we used to end up in: Hero Culture.

Instead of this, we help our teams to deliver as much as possible while keeping standards high. We do this by investing in time-saving techniques, tools and technologies. We try out methods of working to see their effect. If it works, it stays, if it doesn’t we adapt and try something new.

If you want to get more out of your team, help them to work smarter, not longer.

If you trust your team to tell you the truth and deliver to the standards you require, you’ll have a happy, productive bunch of people.

A lovely example of how it shouldn't be