Benefits of Focus

Earlier, I mentioned that the done-centric culture of a truly Agile organization is largely about focus.

Focus has a lot of positive benefits and I'm not going to get into all of them.

Here's a short list, that is good enough for this blog entry.

• It highlights impediments by forcing them to be seen as part of the workflow - if you can't switch focus, it's harder to "look away" from a problem.
• It makes large batch sizes more obvious.
• It minimizes knowledge loss in the course of a task.
• It discourages work on less important tasks when more important ones are done.

There's probably an entire series of blog entries about the importance of focus.

Focus Versus Urgency

Many modern software development frameworks emphasize getting to done.

When transitioning to such a process from a traditional project-management structure, a lot of people seem to map this to the old concept of urgency. In other words, they think that "get to done" means "rush".