Is it ok to … move back to the left? … Is that common or an indication that the pitch wasn’t defined well enough?
No, it doesn’t tell you anything about the pitch. It’s about how that piece of work was scoped. It could be a few things…
- It’s possible somebody moved it over the hill because they had it worked out in their head but hadn’t actually validated it with enough implementation. There should be some real hands-on work on the uphill side that proves the hypothesis before you consider the scope to be over the hill.
- Another possibility is the scope was too broadly defined. If the scope has too much stuff in it, it’s hard to ever be done. But if it’s tighter and smaller, you can see the edges more clearly and just get that one piece done. This means you need to factor more (break things apart more).
- Sometimes you think a scope is small enough but it turns out to be bigger than you expected. Let’s say you have a scope for “reply notification” and you move it over the hill, but then you realize there’s a weird issue with notifications on the phone. Instead of moving the scope backward, first check if all the rest of the work, without this phone issue, is actually over the hill. If so, you can just narrow your definition of that scope and think that this is referring to all the work except for the phone thing. Then continue to track that work and create a new scope specifically for the phone issue: “reply notification on phone.” This lets you identify the unknown and track your progress of figuring it out without muddying the water of the other work that is going along just fine.
See “Prompts to Refactor Scopes” in Chapter 12 for detail on this.
And here’s a piece on the first case, where you mark the work as over the hill without doing all the real work to validate it: Real Work vs. Imaginary Work.
I’m curious to hear if that helps or if you’re seeing something different.
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