Many organizations heeded the COVID-19 warnings and sent people home to work as remote teams. The managers want to proceed as if the people can work from home and have “business as usual.” They’ve made these requests to their staff: Work at home, as if you were at the office. (Keep the same hours and […]
Vasco Duarte of Scrum Master Toolbox fame has invited Mark Kilby and me to a Q&A about thriving with remote work. See Remote Work Live. Vasco is recording the sessions. My session with Mark is on Monday, March 23, 2020, 10 am Eastern. (Yes, the page has time “translation.”) Please do join us. We’ll answer
Three Tips for Coping when Change Might Make You Nuts (Start with Yourself) Given COVID-19, whatever we “knew” about our organizations or work is out the window now. I thought I might help with this three-part series about how you can manage in this time of crazy-making change. This three-part series is: How you can help
You’re “working” from home. The kids are home, and you’re supposed to lead their schooling. Your spouse is home. And, you’re not supposed to go anywhere. Yeah, COVID-19 reality stinks. You CANNOT work the same way you did before. Expecting people to “just” pick up where they left off? Nah. Unreasonable expectations. Here’s what you
Yesterday, you worked in an office with everyone else. Today, you’re supposed to work from home—and so is the rest of your team. And not just for the next few days, but for the next few weeks. What tools do you need? My list of the most important tools: A good microphone and headset so
If you’re like many of the teams I meet, you’ve sort of got a handle on things. You can release. Your product mostly works. And, then Something Happens. And, your team has trouble recovering. That’s brittleness in the system. You can build resilience as a team. In this post, I’ll summarize how your team can
When I started this series about team brittleness and resilience, I expected to discuss winter weather in the Boston area. Every year, we expect several large snowstorms. And, when it snows hard and long, we should stay off the roads so the plows can clear the snow. The organization and team I wrote about in
This series is about helping a team create a less brittle environment—more resilience. Part 1 was about individual work. This part is about shortening feedback loops. Brief description of the problem at a recent client: Person A checked in code that broke an “unrelated” part of the system. I’ll call this checking in code in
I’ve been working with clients who have brittle environments. Their brittleness doesn’t show up all the time. When everything is good, they’re able to finish work and deliver. But, someone checks in code that breaks something “over there.” Or, someone gets pulled off to work on production support issues and is no longer available to
Collecting data isn’t free. There’s a cost to every piece of data. There’s also value. How do we balance the cost and value of data? As with all juicy questions, it depends. And, in general, the easier the data is to collect, the less value there is in the data. Examples of Useless and Cheap