It's a very common thing that I've seen in many projects. Bad inventory management basically. PMs just build a huge backlog of stuff. By the time people get around to that stuff it's months out of date and probably half wrong anyway. That's why waterfall is not a thing. Developers are not great at multi tasking. And switching tasks has a cost of making a context switch. If you spread things out over time, you basically get a lot of cost related to that and you stretch the time to initial feedback on whatever it is you are doing.
The smarter way to manage projects is to deliver stories, design, etc. just in time to have them ready for immediate implementation and thus shorten the cycle time from coming up with a thing to do all the way to having the thing in production. That minimizes context switches and ensures everybody still has everything that was agreed in their heads.
I've been on projects where PMs had 10 sprints completely planned out and they'd be shitting their pants by sprint 2 because it wasn't working out as they wanted it. That's not agile, that's waterfall and it cannot possibly work. But it's what a lot of people revert to.
Reinertsen's points are that there are good reasons that you can reason about from an economical point of view to do things differently that neatly align with a lot of intuitions developers have anyway. Queue theory applies to all sorts of queues, including issue trackers and backlogs.
The smarter way to manage projects is to deliver stories, design, etc. just in time to have them ready for immediate implementation and thus shorten the cycle time from coming up with a thing to do all the way to having the thing in production. That minimizes context switches and ensures everybody still has everything that was agreed in their heads.
I've been on projects where PMs had 10 sprints completely planned out and they'd be shitting their pants by sprint 2 because it wasn't working out as they wanted it. That's not agile, that's waterfall and it cannot possibly work. But it's what a lot of people revert to.
Reinertsen's points are that there are good reasons that you can reason about from an economical point of view to do things differently that neatly align with a lot of intuitions developers have anyway. Queue theory applies to all sorts of queues, including issue trackers and backlogs.