What percentage of design hours should be the development of the developer (we carry) for maximum performance

Question

I am working on a typical internal web application for a large corporation. By typical, I mean, the project, which was projected to be 4 months old, and $ 300,000, seems to be 9 months and $ 1,000,000.

IMHO, one of the reasons for the gross overrun is the ratio of functional people to developers, from 3.5 to 2 (PM, BA, QA and the scrum master, which comes to every meeting). About 250 thousand 600 thousand developers, but at least half of them are developers sitting in meetings with functional people who are trying to reach a consensus with functional people who are not very analytically inclined.

Many hours are also spent at a BA meeting with customers and get a buy-in for an overly complex system that focuses on extreme cases rather than core functions. Given enough time, these people redesign the wheel like a square, fearing that the round wheel might play a role!

One of the problems is that BA, QA and PM are not geeks, and users are full-time, mostly non-technical people. For every hour of meetings and conversations and consuses, I have to spend two hours convincing them that they are trying to create all the flaws of the paper system in a digital system and that the power of the digital system is that 90% of the controls installed by the paper system are not needed .

The long and short, that I feel that I could write a version of the system with 90% functionality in 2 months , if they just leave me alone. Of course, this may be the wrong system, but in a month or two, I am sure that I could fix it.

So, I wonder, "What is your opinion about the optimal functional clock for clock makers in the project?" Also "Are there any published recommendations on this?"

Answer 1

It seems that you have no problems with the attitude of the staff, since the problem is people dealing with other people, instead of their own. This is a subject of company culture, and it comes from top management. If you are in top management, work with HR to identify the root cause of the problem and fix it - if you don't like it.

If you are not a top-level leader, learn to work in it or find a new task. Unfortunately, I do not have much experience in this environment, so I can’t tell you the right way to play politics. But I can say that you have a choice.

Could you...

• Tell people that they need to trust you to do their job, and that they need to do their job. When they invade your space, ask them to stop. Ensure that individual responsibilities are clearly defined and adhere to these definitions.
• Talk to your boss and see if he / she helps people on the spot.
• Try to ensure that other team members are overloaded with the work that they must do, so that they do not do the work that you must do.
• If people want to discuss material that they don’t have a clue about, and you want to make the discussion productive, explain to them that the basics that make the decision obvious are well documented and determine where, preferably text books or standard documents, If they read documents and still do not agree, indicate additional documents that they clearly did not read, but which they need to read.
• ignore what everyone is telling you and just do it “right” - but you damn well better choose the right “right” value. And you lose your job, whatever.
• Ignore what everyone else is saying, as they obviously don’t care what you think, and just go with the flow. Let them see the error of their ways. And you can lose your job and get all the blame when the project fails. And don't be surprised if the people who really caused the problem got a raise.
• Choose a developer or two whose sole responsibility is lost meeting time. These few trusted developers could then return some of the meetings that are really important, and the rest of the team could do their job. Please note that these people are often called "managers" :)

good luck - hope someone else sends a good answer ...

Answer 2

If developers spend more than 4 hours a week in meetings, in my opinion, something is wrong. More than two doubtful. This occurs over a long period of time, since it can vary depending on what stage the project is at.

I do not have hard numbers for this, only the experience that I spent most on meetings is wasted.