A life of its own

I'll continue the back story later. Great developments today. This thing has really taken on a life of it's own. After some initial confusion and resistance, it has become the accepted way for this project. It seems my strategy of striking quickly while no one was looking and getting the process entrenched has worked. After nominal resistance all impacted parties have at least agreed to a wait and see approach. With the (mostly) successful completion of the first iteration people are settling in to following my lead.

I just spoke with HOSER (Head of Support and Everything Release) about using their high level management process to feed into development. They do weekly prioritizations of all feature and function requests from the field.
Previously one of two things would happen:

• Request/priority never makes it down to development
• All requests make it to development, causing shifting priorities every week
  

In the past the latter item was de rigeur for the organization. As a result dev ran in circles and never shipped anything, or shipped things that were so bad they were essentially non-functional (aka thrash mode). An ironic aside is that THUD (the head uf development) claims, with pride, that the group has never missed a ship date. Right. And the Iraqis have never missed a date in their political process either. THUD was able to start shipping functional products by implementing the former bullet with feature lockdown (aka SDLC). This resulted in happy(er) customers, but frustrated management and didn't fix quality or scheduling problems.

Now HOSER sees a shift where management will get more control, and immediately tried to jump back to the model where management constantly shifts priorities. This is where it gets delicate. The answer is: "Yes you get to adjust priorities, and it happens at the iteration breaks/planning meetings." Now I let have to let that stew and brew before THUD gets sold. He's already expressed a disagreement with allowing a living backlog, so the sale will be delicate.