Pay my partner or supplier to make mistakes!

Imagine the following scenario

You are a customer and have chosen an external partner to develop your application. The project starts, everyone is excited. Iterative development is new for you. You have done a sprint planning, and the project starts. Everything is going to be fine 🌈

First retrospective

At the end of the first sprint, you participate in a retrospective. During this meeting, the team shares the good things…BUT…also the not-so-good things and identifies areas for improvement. This is when you learn, for example, that a developer had gone in the wrong direction due to a communication problem between team members. As a result, he potentially lost a day’s work.

“WAIT, WAIT…as a client, you would want me to pay when the team gets it wrong…why pay experts then?”

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This is a perfectly legitimate question.

Short answer: YES, in most cases

Let’s look at the rational behind it. Is it really possible that everything goes 100% as planned in the beginning? That no team member makes any mistake and/or that there are no surprises. The probabilities are bound to play tricks on us. The team will face challenges of all kinds at some point. So why not just acknowledge the little slip-ups along the way?

Transparency can sometimes be scary, especially when we are not used to it. However, not being transparent will inevitably lead to the following situations:

• Overestimation of remaining work (to hide mistakes)
• Tensions within the team
• Eventually, the project will simply fail

Working with experts mitigates some of this risk on a technical expertise side, but it will never be zero! We must not forget that technical expertise is only one type of potential pitfall, a large part of our success is based on relationships between humans and this is the most complex part. What is important is the learning from the pitfalls. This will make the team more efficient and resilient over the course of the iterations. Who knows, maybe this will allow to recover this loss later in efficiency gains in the project.

In summary

You have two choices. Have you tell half-truths (let’s call it what it really is…a lie), or the truth. Personally, I choose the truth…otherwise it will come out sooner or later…