A manager’s day can be extremely hectic. First of all, your calendar looks like one solid block of color – you’ll have to schedule that lunch with friends next quarter. You haven’t seen your desk for more than 30 minutes at a time in weeks. Those precious minutes you aren’t in meetings you can be found overseeing or helping people putting out fires, mitigating interpersonal issues that occasionally make you wonder if you have secretly become a kindergarten teacher and are the last to find out, or going glassy-eyed playing the gantt chart equivalent of Tetris. All this and you still feel like you didn’t do your “work” for the day.
Everyday Kanban
Discussing Management, Teams, Agile, Lean, Kanban & more
Category: Management (page 16 of 25)
A lot of the complexity involved in completing work can stem from how we choose to organize our teams. Teams are entities with boundaries. We actually make teams to form boundaries, although you might not have thought of it in quite those terms before. Boundaries are not inherently good or bad – they can create focus and the lack of them can take that focus away. Boundaries become handoff points and badly placed boundaries can create complex systems of dependent handoffs that make it much more frustrating and costly to complete work.
Once, after Seattle Lean Coffee, I had a conversation with a fellow participant about how my team started pair programming. First, I admitted that my entire team doesn’t pair program. My small teams (or pods, as we call them) self organize and function along team agreements they take part in making. But, if I thought it would be advantageous for my teams to attempt pair programming, there are ways that I could communicate and work with them to get them to try it out.
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