LEUTAM – pronounced "Loo Tam"

There was an article recently published about how middle aged persons, all over the world, suffer from depression in their 40s and seem to recover in their 50s. The researches who made this finding theorized that by your 50s, you become more comfortable with what you have than what you wanted to have in your 40s. In other words a person in their 50s had lowered their expectations about life to be more realistic and became happier as a result.

This is a great example of the L.E.U.T.A.M., Lower Expectations Until They Are Met, principle.

I know this might seem counter intuitive or like an endorsement of mediocrity, it its not. It really boils down to a “Haste makes waste” type of scenario. Let me explain.

Much of the Software Development Management process is about managing expectations of our customers and other stakeholders. We set deadlines for certain functionalities to be delivered with acceptable deployable quality and that becomes an expectation. If a software development team consistently hits their deadlines with high quality software they are heroes for meeting their deadlines. Miss expectations and you are viewed as “Under performing” by management and worse by your customers who were promised the new functions for their hard earned dollars.

In other words software development teams that meet their deadlines with the accepted level of quality they are good at managing and meeting expectations. They don’t necessarily work harder. The probably work less hard (That’s the point here), but are very good at setting reasonable expectations and communicating them.

So why LEUTAM?

There is a huge cost to setting expectations too high. Unreasonable expectations put pressure on the development team to produce more product features than is possible, leading to stress, short term thinking and degradation of the team’s morale. A team under schedule stress will keenly feel the pressure to meet the impossible expectations by cutting corners, working late (i.e. tired) and taking shortcuts that undermine quality in the effort to meet a date, so management feels there has been progress toward a project milestone.

Late delivery and/or poor quality obviously affect the customer view of your product too.  Based on poorly managed company expectations, the customer has been told of new product features and has developed their own expectations and made plans around these expectations. When a customer’s expectations are not met, it will impact sales as customers take their business someplace else. Worse they may spread negative “Word of Mouth” about your products and services.
 
Poor quality will not only negatively impact the customer, but will also impact the next project cycle as well.  Without the LEUTAM mindset, you will have a new set of equally unrealistic expectations to perform against, with the extra burden of building on top of poor quality code and poor team morale.

Missing expectations repeatedly causes a snowball effect leading to less efficient future development as the effects of poor quality and low morale compound on each project cycle. Instead of putting effort towards new product features, effort has to be spent on addressing bugs in the deployed products and refactoring of poorly written code. Because this cost compounds, recovering from this situation is very costly.

LEUTAM!!

Lowering expectations until they are met allows you to take the time to develop code in a reasonable time frame unhurried and unrushed. In software development, less is more. Well established realistic expectations will lead to proper development of quality software by highly motivated developers. Each future project release will be built upon a solid foundation making each development cycle more efficient. This is a great place to be when starting the next project, because most of your effort goes into new feature work. More revenue! Your customers will be happy too!

 © Don P. Gibson 2008