Reflections on 2020 .... team work and productivity

2020 has been a strange work year, it has exposed some underlying issues such as benefits of remote working. Here I take a look at a couple of practices that I think 2020 has shown some clarity.

Impact of 100% utilisation

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
One thing that really became clear was how 100% utilisation impacts team work. I think this creates an organisational bias towards individual contributions, unilateral decision making, and knowledge silos vs team work, collaboration, and shared understanding. This is due to overlapping free time in the team reducing as you have other constraints, such as reduced working hours, and other unexpected work.

That being said Rich Mironov has some warnings around what happens when you think "We [should] keep some overflow engineering capacity for emergencies.". The tiny fix example he gives is IME usually a signal for a bit of an outsized time sink, due to the knock on effects it can have in the product due to increasing testing complexity or just not fitting into the product properly.

How to use quiet periods

The other thing is that it is clearer to me that "quiet" periods, such as the summer holidays and the run up to Christmas, should be used for house keeping work in clearing up outstanding issues. Rather than trying to continue in keeping up output in new product development. I also have a hunch that if you pull at the thread of ignored bugs and workarounds a product team will do some useful discovery work. Is there a hidden use case there? Is that feature really used the way you think it is? The reason I think this, is because it's a kind of forcing function to bring focus to product usage and user problems. Rather than product team or organisation ideas. There is some value in ideas, but ultimately you deliver value by solving user problems and to do that you get a better quality of idea being closer to the user. 

Be kind to yourself

Related to the quiet periods above, use this time to recharge your batteries. get moving, eat well, drink water, and get some sleep! Also take time to "compare down" to where you've come from, don't just "look up" to what the perfect scenario is. Also take a big picture look around, you get a different sense of perspective not being in the deep level of detail. This might just help unlock some thinking if you're stuck. (even if you don't realise it!)

Also try something different ... I setup a photography portfolio site, which led into starting an Etsy shop!

My Top 5 posts of 2020

Further Reading 

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