One more feature please ...

How can you get discipline to not have feature creep? How can you decide when it is appropriate to change your plans to accommodate a request? What can you do if your business depends on accommodating feature requests?

In many ways this goes back to the discussion about how important predictability is to your company. As I have said before, I believe it is paramount. It is how your sales folks know what they can sell and how customers can know what to expect and depend on it. Predictability as a priority allows your employees to stay focused and feel accomplished.

Unfortunately, we know the technology world changes quickly. Here are some basics you must do to even have a discussion about change later:

• Have an approved budget
• Have an approved roadmap
• Have a release definition and approval process

Once you have these things, then you can put in an exception or variation process. Without them, your developers and company will experience unpredictability and chaos.

You should develop an exception process that looks at the following:

• The business case for doing the feature
• The development cost for doing a feature
• The other things doing this feature will affect like schedule or resources or customer expectation
• Executive signoff

The major thing is to make a premeditated decision. There are almost always tradeoffs and your company needs good information in order to make those tradeoffs. Good executives will help make sure the right decision is made and minimize the number of exceptions they will entertain.

If you find that you are experiencing a lot of feature requests because of customer requirements or industry requirements, then you may have to firewall resources to handle them. Think top-down. How much of your development resource do you want to dedicate to handling these kind of requests? Allocate them and use managerial courage to not allocate anyone else. If you always dip into all of our resources, you will never accomplish the less tactical and more strategic goals. Get agreement from the stake holders like sales or professional services on the allocation. If this still does not meet the needs of the business, you may have to rethink your business model.

Change is good. Constant change is not.

More later ...