Backlog

I don't think I'll ever get used to the fact of an ever-increasing backlog. And yet this has been my reality since working in IT–and especially software development. I remember at a past job we ran an extensive analysis of outstanding programming requests and discovered that, if we stopped all current work and took no new projects and only focused on our backlog, we'd have something like seven years worth of work ahead of us. That's astonishing and horrifying in itself, but it's not the half of it. That time frame was based on current estimates attached to requests, which are often off by a factor of two or more.

It's been the same everywhere else I've worked. I have theories as to why. The simplest is just that it's so much easier to ask for something that build it. Duh. But even when policies are in place to slow down incoming work, or properly shunt long-term ideas off to the side somewhere it still feels burdensome, and increasingly so over time. Eventually it's like you need a whole system for managing your backlog. When enough time passes duplicate requests come in, or systems drift making old requests outdated, or the developer who estimated a request or the stakeholder who asked for it cycled out and just getting the original context is hard. More and more maintenance time is then needed for processes like de-duping and triaging and prioritization.

One difference these days is that I've always had project managers (or the equivalent) at previous jobs. Turns out this is a real and often very under-appreciated role. I'm on a much smaller team now and we really don't have that position and are very much feeling the pain. It's a vicious cycle: you lack the resources for a project manager, work piles up, the maintenance of said work becomes an increasing background time-suck, causing less work to get done and more to pile up etc.

Has anyone figured this issue out? Is the right response to accept the backlog as just an integral part of this career and not worry about it? Why then does there almost always seem to be so much angst about it? Somehow it always feels as though, if you just developed the right system, the right triaging and allocation and estimating system, you'd have things in their right place and things would be much better. It's always painful to me to see things sitting, or to have a clever and useful request come in but suspect that we're years away from being able to implement the thing. It always feels like failure.