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How to measure how much a #remote team is “gelling”

April 15, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

“No, you see, you have to monitor what people are doing. If you don’t do that, people will just do a minimum of work,” Alessja said.

I used to run this same team, and everything felt faster. They were talking to each other to figure out how to pass things along. And things just happened. True self management. And now the performance fell apart. It had devolved into everyone working on their own tasks again, as I was trying to coordinate a number of teams simultaneously.

“I don’t feel comfortable with that”, I countered. By increasing control and trying to force people to go faster, you’d likely get the opposite effect. I had in mind my previous experience at the Lego event. Moreover, there are other ways to keep discipline in a new product environment.

“I tend to agree”, the senior executive on the call diplomatically concurred.

Was I just being naive? I’d already managed this team in the past. At this point, I was running a program that included it, just shipping something new. I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong.

Filed Under: metrics, velocity

Disproved: I can just react to everything and have a productive culture

February 26, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Most people are familiar with the 4×4 matrix of urgency and importance that Steven Covey popularized. (Or actually misappropriated from President Eisenhower).

Filed Under: innovation, manage risks, release planning, velocity Tagged With: planning, proactiveness, Steven Covey

Why “work time” reduction is futile

February 13, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

One of the common anti-patterns which comes from a more traditional project management toolbox is estimating work time. This estimate is later used as a tool to hold employees accountable. To help managers steer the ship, while making sure that utilization stays high. In particular, the measuring stick for good management is that employees are efficient. Over time, employees take less and less time to do a particular type of task.

Call me crazy, but this feels short-sighted to me.

If you are looking improving output and velocity of work (as opposed to employee efficiency) it goes up significantly when you have a solid team dynamic. Where people reach out and help one another, especially if they have different skill sets required to ship a particular feature. This a classic case of conventional management wisdom not tying true causes and effects together.

Ultimately what you care about is finished work. And finished work comes about quickly when a good team dynamic exists, not when individuals are efficient. To be blunt, this comes down to peer pressure dynamics among team members. For a team to work, they need to know what to expect of each other.

This is most obvious in team ball sports.

Any given player needs to pay attention to what everyone else on the court is doing, in order to figure out where to go next. Yes there is a coach on the sidelines, and a captain on the court, but the responsibility rests with the individual.

Filed Under: assumptions, release planning, velocity Tagged With: elapsed time, work time

How to know if your company’s agile transformation is working

January 8, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Came across a wonderful article on medium.com by Jack Skeels. The starting point is Jack bemoaning that HBR is now singing the praises of Agile at Scale (re-dubbed "Agile as Anything Management Wants"). According to him, the actual results of agile are significantly below what is promised. Most companies applying agile focus on process, because that's how they think they'll get efficiency gains. But they miss key subtle points underlying the whole thing. Like moving away from digital taylorism. And towards team self-management.

Filed Under: metrics, velocity Tagged With: digital taylorism

Why over-focussing on velocity causes the opposite effect

November 27, 2019 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Following up on the slightly longer analysis of overfocussing on output and velocity, I think there are a few things that are overlooked with a pure velocity based model. Most of them have been known for decades in the software industry. They are squishy.

Filed Under: velocity

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    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

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