I’m relatively new in my current job — working on 6 months now. I was speaking with another manager and the conversation drifted to the first changes my team implemented after I joined. But, as every good change agent knows, before you implement changes, you have to orient and observe.

When I came aboard, my team had a sizable backlog and every feature request and bug report was assigned out to members of my team of 8. New items came in daily and items were assigned as soon as they were received, regardless of how long it would be until it got attention. Each team member had handfuls of requests assigned to them plus any work for projects they were working on. Not only that, but each team member took weekly turns being the person that spent time each day figuring out who would be assigned to every new item.

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