You start with Notepad. But you get better. You move onto Excel/Sheets. And you keep getting better. And then you bring in Trello. In doing this you don’t stop figuring out a better path. And then you move on to Azure DevOps or JIRA. You use the tool that makes the most sense, for the team you have, for the project you are trying to deliver. If you need JIRA and are using Notepad, you’re…
At this moment, where do you need to be? Where does your team need you to be? Are those two questions in direct opposition to each other? If they are, that might be part of the challenge you are having in not only leading yourself and but your team as well.
If your delivery dates are more dream than reality, you have a problem. It means there is a disconnect, a huge one between what your team is focused on and what they are being asked for. If I’m in a meeting and I start to see this happen, a small voice starts going off in my head – “No, no, no, no, no” – and that’s the warning sign (simple as it may be) that…
Mad Scrambles happen when “something” big is happening. Not everyone has a good idea of what the “something” is, what it means or what the impact on the work is. In short, the team all has a different view of what it is to be done. As a result, the team starts going in various directions doing what they think is right to fix that something which ends in everyone going in different directions (i.e.,…
The blocked state is the one and only state that everyone looks at. Because they know it’s bad. They know something is wrong. They know something is broken. But they don’t know what, so they ask questions. They seek to learn more. They want to understand and talk about. Too bad we don’t talk about all states this way, but we’ll start with blocked.