The 3-Step Product Management Guide to Meeting Your Commitments

Interview Preparation Management
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To be able to deliver on your customers’ expectations, you should set and manage realistic goals in the first place. Here is our 3-step product management guide on how to meet your commitments and achieve a more predictable delivery workflow.

  1. Stop Estimating and Start Forecasting
    Knowledge work is notorious for its unpredictable nature. Making accurate future predictions allows organizations to define service level agreements with more confidence and deliver value to their customers on time, in a consistent, predictable manner.
    One of the most pressing questions every manager faces is “When will this be done?”. And it might be a challenging question if you don’t have the means to give a confident answer
  2. Start Your Work on Time, Neither Too Early nor Too Late

The best chance for delivering on time comes when you make sure you start on time. When you start working on your assignments too early, you are taking from the time that could be otherwise spent realizing other business opportunities. You’re both wasting capacity on work that is not yet due and running out of capacity for work that is due.

When you start too late, though, you risk delaying your work and breaking your commitments. The longer you wait, the higher the chance of a delay. So when is the best time to start?

First, you need to look at your probability forecast for the specific class of service you’re interested in. Here is the forecast produced by the Cycle Time Scatterplot for tasks of Standard CoS:
3. Manage Your Work in Progress
As the start date approaches and you begin working upon your commitments, keep track of the age of your work. Tools such as the Aging Chart offer a detailed overview of where your tasks are in your process and how much time they’ve already spent in progress.
Manage your work in progress to deliver on time
The colored zones draw the timeline of how your tasks have advanced in the past. For example, the green zones show the times that 50% of your previous tickets have spent in each process state. By observing how your current work is moving through the zones, you have a pretty good chance of meeting your commitments. Make sure your work items don’t cross the percentiles you use to define your SLA. The higher the dots, the larger the chance of delay.

We recommend taking a closer look at the tasks that move to the yellow zone. These tasks have already spent more time in your process than half of the work items completed so far.