Don't Make Teams Go Faster; Help Them Shake Off What's Making Them Slow

This resource first appeared in issue #109 on 11 Feb 2022 and has tags Strategy: Prioritization

Prioritization, multiple work streams, unplanned work. Oh my! - Leeor Engel
Engineering managers: How to reduce drag on your team - Chris Fraser

Research computing shares with smaller, newer organizations like startups a very dynamic set of demands, requirements, and work. This distinguishes both from work in teams at many large mature organizations or in IT shops. The dynamism makes prioritization and focus especially important.

Engel describes some principles for managing work in such a dynamic environment:

When everything is important than nothing is important - prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
- Pareto principle: what’s the most important/tricky 20%?
Finish what you start first - (I, not uncommonly in our field, struggle with this one)
Reduce uncertainty as soon as possible - do experiments and proofs of concept and expect a bunch of them not to pan out
Reduce context switching by having team members on one or maybe two streams of work

Fraser’s article is superficially on a completely different topic. We’ve talked before (#39, #76) about how the key to speeding teams’ progress isn’t about urging them faster so much as removing things that make them go slower. But key items Fraser points out that cause drag are the same things Engel urges us to work on:

Reduce context switching (reduce streams of work)
Improve communication and clarify goals

Other items - improve trust with regular one-on-ones, and implement the tooling the team needs - are the bread-and-butter of management work.