Raymond Lewallen wrote a post a few days ago that talked about identifying waste. What I found most interesting in his post was the paragraph about backlogs (excess inventory). You see, at Telligent our product release cycles are broken down into milestones, which are broken down into 2-week iterations. As the release cycle moves along, items get added to our backlog. Lots of items. Invariably, we can't clear the backlog. If we tried to take care of every single item in the backlog, we'd never ship anything.
For example, we're shipping two versions of Community Server this week: CS 2008.5 and CS Evolution. The backlog for CS 2008.5 has 260 items; CS Evolution has 121. That's a lot of items, and in lean terms, it's simply excess inventory; a form of waste.
So now that we're shipping this week, what do we do with all those items in the backlogs? The standard answer is that these items simply fall into the work for the next release, which is fine, but a lot of planning has to take place. You have to go through the lists, reassess/revalidate each item, give them an estimate, identify iterations, assign them out, etc. You also have to take duplication into consideration, because with that many items you're bound to have duplicates, which just takes more time to deal with.
But why didn't these items make the cut into the product? Because they weren't critical to the success of releasing *that* specific version. And that brings me back to Raymond's post where he says "If it's important, it will resurface later". It might be from a customer, from internal dogfooding, or from your CEO; it doesn't matter. What matters is that if it's important, it will resurface later.
Think about that for a second and realize how liberating it is. It reminds me of an aspect of Inbox Zero, where at some point you might have to simply move all your email into a DMZ folder that is used only for archival purposes. The thought behind this is "If someone needed something from me, they'll email me again". That's no different than what Raymond points out in his post about backlogged items. I've done the DMZ thing with my email and admit it's one of the most liberating things I've ever done. And it works because guess what? If someone needs something from me, they'll email me again.
Armed with these thoughts, I sent an email tonight to a couple other leads and PMs asking what they thought about moving all our existing backlog items into a DMZ-like location and seeing what items resurface. It'll be interesting to get their take on the approach, but I'd also love to hear your feedback on this. What do you think? Have you ever done this? If so, how did it work out?
