This is the December 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.
I have the same problems as many of you do: I start something and then I realize it's much larger than I expected. That occurred with this month's newsletter.
The problem I tried to address was the overwhelming pushes and pulls of the various kinds of leadership work. I started to write that two weeks ago (!!)—and I'm not done.
Instead of trying to cram a 5-pound bag of content into my monthly newsletter, I will finish writing that and decide what to do. I might offer a summary post here in the newsletter and more details as blog posts. Or, I might write a newsletter series.
But that still left me with a big problem: what to write in my monthly newsletter to you, my readers.
I decided on several tips you can use at any level of the organization.
Tip 1: The Project Always Starts Before We Think It Does
I first wrote about this in Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. I gave you a personal example of that in my introduction here. But here are other examples:
- Someone or some team has researched or prototyped a new idea or product.
- The project portfolio team has already discussed this idea. (Too often, for too long before they assign a team to do the work.)
- The product leaders think they have a market opportunity. That leads them to do some low-fidelity experiments to see if it's worth their time to do more.
Even if you have a “greenfield” product, someone has considered this work before the team starts.
That means some people have shifted their thinking about what's possible or useful. If you are one of those people, your challenge is to help other people—the team—shift their thinking. The team's job is to learn what those people already learned or assumed.
Once people understand what's changed, use the most agility your team and organization allows to work by value.
Tip 2: Always Ask the Value Question, Not the Cost Question
So many managers ask how much the project will cost or how long the team will take. That's not a useful question, because no one can know at the start of the project. Too few of us know during the middle of the project. And at the end, we've already spent the money and taken the time. (See my example above. I did not expect that piece of writing to take this long or need this many words!)
Instead, ask about value, as in Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects:
- The zeroth question: Is this still valuable? Should we do this at all?
- Use Cost of Delay to rank by value. (Not prioritization, which can be high, medium high, ultra high, mega-ultra high. Yes, insert a wry-smiley here. But ranking, which is one #1, one #2, one #3, etc.)
- Decide what value means to you: is it customer acquisition, retention or referrals? Sometimes, revenue is the most valuable, but sometimes, the network effect of more customers is more valuable.
When you know what value means to you and your organization, you can measure the time to value, a team's cycle time.
Tip 3: Use the Flow Metrics to Measure and Manage Work
If you have not yet read Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers, please do. The more each team knows about its cycle time, the more accurate they can be with their prediction. They won't have perfect prediction (as I illustrated above!), but they will have pretty good prediction. That's because the flow metrics show this team's reality:
- Cycle time is how teams know their reality of what they can do over time. This includes management teams. (See How to Move from Story Points and Magical Thinking to Cycle Time for Decisions for more information.)
- Once people see how WIP (Work in Progress) affects everything else, they will start to make those very difficult ranking decisions.
- And if people map their value streams, they can see if and where they cycle in the middle of their work. Here are some typical examples: waiting for code review, waiting for the “shared service” people to be available, waiting for the product leader to approve the work.
While the flow metrics show us reality, they help us even more in understanding why we have wait states. That allows us to choose what to do about them.
Choose One Thing to Improve
I've offered three ideas that I hope will change your thinking. While I always hope you choose all of them, maybe this year the answer is “choose one thing.” You only need to get better at one thing every day before you totally change your work. (I wrote about that on my other blog here: How Can You Use the Compounding Effect to Achieve What You Want?)
I hope your 2025 brings you more of what you want and less of what you do not want. My best wishes for you, and wish me luck in wrangling the writing about the overwhelm of leadership.
This newsletter touches on topics in all my books. (Yes, please do laugh along with me.)
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© 2024 Johanna Rothman
Pragmatic Manager: Vol 21, #12, ISSN: 2164-1196