Whilst I’m waiting for that kettle to boil….

Context switching. We’re all guilty of it. Even those of us that lecture others not to do it.

An example occurred recently when I was in the middle of answering several emails, whilst also talking to someone on the phone. (Cue Male multi-tasking jokes.)

Anyway, instead of sending a document on to my team for review, I inadvertently sent it to the wrong distribution list and sent it to 450 staff instead. You all know how well the Outlook “recall email” feature works right?

So instead of saving me time by working on multiple things at once, my multi-tasking cost me 2 days. For the next 48 hours, I received and responded to emails form confused people asking me why they had to review a project charter template.

This same scenario plays itself out in many other work facets. Do you have team members working on more than 1 project? Or more than 1 feature at a time? Is your organisation working on numerous initiatives at once instead of prioritising and completing one at a time?

There’s an often circulated graph from Weinberg that represents the loss in productivity to context switching.

Sometimes you're better off staying at home and not coming into the office...

Another one I like to use is this one from Rally. When they look at the underlying data from their hosted product, they noticed a significant increase in bugs when team members were working on more than 1 project. So whilst it seems faster, It’s actually costing you more in the long run. 

Excuse me – I have to go re-boil the kettle.

What’s good?

I was contracting on a pretty tough project at the time, and got a request for a meeting with one of the consultants in the firm that was sub-contracting me out to the client. In hind-sight, I think he was on the bench and they just wanted to keep him busy, but his supposed aim was to get a pulse on the consultants and what was/wasn’t working.

I still clearly remember when he asked me how happy I was in the role on a scale of 1 to 10 and I replied with “7”. “Oh, that’s great” he said.

No it’s not.

7 is meh.

Having previously experienced awesome, I knew how un-awesome the current role was.

I quite like the simplicity of the net-promoter scoring system.

Essentially there is only 1 question  - How likely would you be to recommend the service/product to someone else. The ranking is out of 10 and the scoring gives you an indication of who is a detractor, a passive or a promoter. You want promoters.  You want your team out there talking to friends about what an awesome place it is to work.

So based on my scoring, I was passive about the company (which was true - I wasn't exactly running around raving about it to my friends). 

If you’re an employer or a leader at a company and your staff are ranking your workplace a 7, You’re better than that.

Finding Awesome Product Owners

We were having particular trouble with the product ownership on a project and I wanted to create some training on what you want in a good product owner. Henrik Knibergs video is brilliant and I use it regularly, but then I came up with the 5 A’s to an awesome product owner below:

Ability - Is able to be the voice of the customer.

Authority - Empowered to make decisions on a day to day basis

Autonomous - One single "owner". Not a committee.

Available - There on a day to day basis to work with the team

Adaptable -  Flexible to changing situations and environments

Whilst there’s only 5 traits – finding them in the one person at a large organisation can be ridiculously hard. The person with authority usually isn’t available. The person with the ability may not be adaptable enough to work in an agile way. In a large business, it may be hard to find someone with sufficient autonomy.

No one said this would be easy…

Take your hand off it

Can’t get people off their mobile phones?

Use them as part of your meetings.

Live online surveys are awesome, as it forces them to interact using their devices and they can’t check Instagram at the same time. Well, they can, but they’d be context switching and you all know that’s  a no-no now right? 

There’s a bunch out there, but Directpoll is free and seems to work well.

I sometimes also use planning poker apps instead of cards – There are some free ones out there – Scrum Poker cards has worked for me.

Ask your staff

We had an IT Exec call us up once and ask us what they should do to help their team. Over the previous 2 years, they’d gotten good at iterative delivery and we’re pushing features into production on a weekly basis. The nature of the systems meant that those deployments usually occurred on a weekend and he was worried about burning out his teams. (Which is a good thing that he cared).

Our response?

“Why are you asking us? Ask your team.”

And once you've worked out if it is/isn't a problem, then ask them what you can do to help.

We continually run into the management trap of trying to make decisions and solve problems in isolation, when we’re too far removed from the coal face where the problems are occurring.

Caution: Be careful that you actually action and are willing to solve the teams issues. It only takes 1 or 2 instances of “My door is open – please tell me your problems” that never lead to any solutions before they will stop coming to you. And that breakdown in trust may be even more detrimental.