So, you’ve just spent three months creating a mountain of requirements, you now have to tip toe around not disturbing the requirements in case there is an avalanche of stakeholder outrage when you say you need to remove a button or change the title of a page.
Another three months pass, and you start showing people what you’ve built, but you don’t get the response you expect. They are disinterested and ask about a requirement that has never been mentioned before…
There are many ways (and some of them are polite) of describing why your boss is now asking for something completely different. I’ve grouped some of them under the “collective memory” heading. The collective memory is that general consensus, the overall flow of a situation – it is not about the detail. It is driven by / made up of:
- The pace of change in the world
- Perspective of “too much detail just give me the headlines”
- Don’t care (or can’t) remember what I asked for x months ago
- Don’t want to be held accountable for boring long term goals – easier to forget
A good example of an industry where this is particularly obvious is media led companies. Their needs as a business change with what is happening in the news, or events around the world. The requirements or underlying premise can literally change radically in 24 hours.
Based on my experience, I think of the collective memory as about six months.
Take politics as an example. A scandal involving a politician will make the news for a week or two, they become an outcast and will never be allowed back into politics. Then as time goes by the follow up news articles have longer and longer between them. After about six months, the articles have stopped completely, and the reality is that the public might well vote that politician back in again.
In a business, after six months, it is often too late to deliver a specific stakeholder requirement. The world has moved on, the stakeholders have moved on, and there is no longer a demand for that requirement in that specific shape or form.
Your product still exists
Importantly, though, there is still a product, there is still a solution, but not the exact requirements fought over in a number of meetings. What I found was the as long as you kept the general shape the same – they didn’t care about some of those early requirements, but they are interested in an evolved version based on the original themes and ideas.
I think that some of the reason that Agile has a lot of power is that it aligns with that short collective memory, reinforcing the need to deliver small change frequently in a visual / tangible way.
Actions from this section
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Stepping stones
Use epics as stepping stones to move forward
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Lightweight target architecture
Treat this as directional guidance, holding shape – especially for those who want a long-term view.