01 The Wheel of Change

“I don’t understand why this is still a thing. I’ve moved it to the Done column, why are we still working on this?!” is what Ido, a senior engineer who worked on my team at RapidAPI, used to frequently say out of deep frustration. I can truly relate. We merely thought we were done with it, but we never were. And we never will. Let’s talk about how Tasks are born and die.

Change entails Feedback that entails Change. We need to pause and ask ourselves “has it always been like this?”. So let’s take a little detour. Let’s go back to the days before Agile and get a quick history lesson.

Spinning is important to meet the business requirements. The trick to deliver fast, is to deliver small. And as Change entails Feedback, it would entail a small Feedback followed by a small Change. Let's talk practically on the day-to-day implications of this.

The spin has a speed, which can be controlled by throttling it correctly. We can speed it up and slow it down when necessary. It would require to overcome our self created inertia.

Only when a Change is done, its actual business value presents itself. From the moment of initiation to the moment of completion, a value goes through a process of fruition which ends with the actual value. The actual value and the expected value will probably differ, and both will be effected by the duration of the fruition process.

In the last chapter of this series, we're going to talk about one last property of the Wheel of Change. Sometimes we just need to know when to stop spinning it, otherwise we'll just be executing valueless tasks.