Then if the team works hard (say, they're superhuman and can work 24 hours a day 7 days a week straight) and do what other teams do in 3 months in one, will they get the other two off?
Not exactly, but a similar situation happened with my team.
There was a period where we simply accomplished a lot more than other teams. It wasn't superhuman effort, which isn't sustainable. Instead, it was better tool selection and streamlined processes (automation and continuous delivery, which shed a lot of the baggage that comes with large releases) that accounted for most of the increase in productivity. In fact, my team worked less hours and had fewer production issues than other teams.
The organization (eventually) reacted the way that healthy organizations should...they promoted most of the team into leadership roles in other teams that weren't performing as well. The reward for our success was more money and responsibility and the entire organization benefited from what we'd learned.
I say eventually, because I had to fight a pretty big PR battle before management above me saw the virtue of the way that my team operated. Before that, there was a tendency to give star performer awards and kudos to people putting in long hours to make release deadlines or putting in heroic efforts to keep error-prone production environments up an running. Management saw my team leaving at a normal time every day and didn't think that was worth rewarding. It took a mountain of data for me to show that a boring, predictable production environment that allowed us to push out more features was better serving customers.
curun1r|9 years ago
There was a period where we simply accomplished a lot more than other teams. It wasn't superhuman effort, which isn't sustainable. Instead, it was better tool selection and streamlined processes (automation and continuous delivery, which shed a lot of the baggage that comes with large releases) that accounted for most of the increase in productivity. In fact, my team worked less hours and had fewer production issues than other teams.
The organization (eventually) reacted the way that healthy organizations should...they promoted most of the team into leadership roles in other teams that weren't performing as well. The reward for our success was more money and responsibility and the entire organization benefited from what we'd learned.
I say eventually, because I had to fight a pretty big PR battle before management above me saw the virtue of the way that my team operated. Before that, there was a tendency to give star performer awards and kudos to people putting in long hours to make release deadlines or putting in heroic efforts to keep error-prone production environments up an running. Management saw my team leaving at a normal time every day and didn't think that was worth rewarding. It took a mountain of data for me to show that a boring, predictable production environment that allowed us to push out more features was better serving customers.