Writing
Notes on delivery governance, written while building DeliverySheet. Opinionated, specific, and about the part of the job that happens before the work starts — deciding what to commit to.
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Separate the facts from the assumptions before you plan anything
Requests arrive as a blend of what is known, what is assumed and what nobody has checked. Written in one voice, the assumptions get treated as facts.
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AI should draft and challenge. It should not decide.
Where an LLM genuinely helps in delivery planning, where it must not be trusted, and the design rule that keeps the two apart.
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Saying no is a decision. Record it like one.
Most requests that never get built were never actually declined — they were left to rot in a backlog. That costs more than a clear no.
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"No known risks" has to be a valid answer
Planning templates that only accept filled-in fields get filled in. The result is a risk register full of fiction, which is worse than an empty one.
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You will commit before you are ready. Make it cost four fields.
Banning early commitments does not stop them, it hides them. Recording them takes a minute and converts an invisible gamble into a decision with a name on it.
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Why delivery commitments slip before a single line of code
Most missed delivery dates are decided weeks before the work starts — at the moment a request becomes a commitment without anyone checking whether it was ready.
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Vertical and horizontal work: the distinction planning tools miss
Delivery streams and cross-cutting concerns behave differently, need different capacity models, and fail differently. Most tools call both an "epic".
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Allocation, not consumption: what an engineering manager should measure
The case for measuring what people are committed to rather than what they spend their hours on — and why the second one degrades the first.
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FTE-months: a capacity unit you can defend in a budget meeting
Story points do not survive contact with finance. FTE-months are coarse, boring, and convert directly into the two answers leadership asks for.
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