Speaking to the task size point, I’ve found (via leading a number of teams and training many more team leads) it’s possible to decompose any task into smaller tasks so that every task is within a small constant factor of each other.
If it seems impossible for a given task, maybe because it’s particularly complex or has lots of unknowns, then no problem, simply create a “spike” task to research or prototype whatever you need to in order to decompose the big task into appropriately sized chunks (for your team’s idea of appropriate).
See you end up with a bunch of tasks that are all roughly the same size or are spikes of similar size, and you can have the very nice predictability and productivity that the author is speaking about.
(btw, I also agree that contact switches are never cheap for software developers, so it’s better to let them finish whatever they’re working on whenever it’s not too unreasonable to allow it)
If it seems impossible for a given task, maybe because it’s particularly complex or has lots of unknowns, then no problem, simply create a “spike” task to research or prototype whatever you need to in order to decompose the big task into appropriately sized chunks (for your team’s idea of appropriate).
See you end up with a bunch of tasks that are all roughly the same size or are spikes of similar size, and you can have the very nice predictability and productivity that the author is speaking about.
(btw, I also agree that contact switches are never cheap for software developers, so it’s better to let them finish whatever they’re working on whenever it’s not too unreasonable to allow it)