Priority and time

The kids got me a gas grill for Father's Day, so I've been getting in more grillin' lately.

Last night we had an impromptu gathering, so I fired up the grill.  I have a bad habit of overcooking things, so this time I decided to give the actual grilling more attention (priority).  But as is often the case for me, I had lots of other things to do and I ended up not managing the cooking time very well.

This got me thinking about how we manage some teams here.  Many times here, we have so much going on that we just focus on managing priority.  We keep a list of tasks or projects from most important to least important, when someone finishes a task they look for the next available task in priority order.

On the teams where we use this, it tends to work great.  But often you can't predict the time something will be available without having some more specific controls.  So typically, we have additional milestones that we use to drive things to a little more predictable schedules - loads of our online services, demo days, etc.  These teams basically don't work in fixed sprints but have weekly priority reviews and daily scrums.

It's not perfect, but I have to admit it's more accurate than my grilling time management :) 

Anybody else use a hybrid method like this?

Have fun,

Brian

P.S.  Anybody want some slightly charred beef?