I love doing Planning Days. Why? Because everyone is focused on one task. Because the time limit is open and designed to hear people talk – there is no rush to finish. Because it’s an opportunity to hear people’s thoughts away from everything else going on in the day-to-day. Now having a successful planning day is altogether a different story and requires preparation, ensuring everyone knows what they are there for and what they need…
Processes are only as good as the team implementing them. But they won’t save you. They will compliment you, they will support you, they will raise you up. But they won’t save you. At the core of any process is the people and they will be what saves you.
If you don’t know what you are measuring, you will never know how you are doing. Once you know what you want to measure, you have to accept that in the first X collection periods the data is going to be horrible, downright horrific. Because you have never collected it before. Because you have never analyzed it before. If you give up looking at it, you will be no better off from where you started…
Can you grow your team remotely? And I’m not talking physically – I’m talking about leadership, development skills, scale, empathy, learning. Did you grow your team remotely? Did they develop over the past year when they were all separate? They probably weren’t attending any conferences this year so what did you offer them instead? It’s good not to have answers to these questions, it’s bad to now not do anything about it. Set the goals…
When you are small, everyone and everything is within reach – you are all close together, all next to each other. You can smell the excitement and fear as you push code into production. It’s not one person doing it, it’s everyone, waiting, with bated breath to see what happens. When a customer calls in with an issue, everyone is watching the chat conversation or listening to the speaker. Everyone is there, everyone is involved…