I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.
Tuesday - Organizational Inertia
The action is to make sure the organization has measurements for performance. For my team I’ve instituted an agile process. Initially this was to just capture the work we were doing. Eventually, I was asked to measure the performance. The simple fix for this was to start pointing our work in terms of effort. Year-or-year I have a goal for myself to get 20% more out of my team. I recently, had a conversation with my team about this as my goal. We had an improvement in effort comparing last years numbers to this years of about 20%. There’s all sorts of reasons for this. A big one is probably that we didn’t go to conferences this year. Another is that we improved our processes.
The team was concerned that there is only a finite amount of effort that can be gained from the team. I told them that while this is true, we can look for ways to be more efficient. There are also ways that I can do a better job of managing. For instance, I noticed a dip in points when I start canceling or skipping our team meeting. Ticket creation and reporting slipped on the board. This year I am focusing on making my team meeting more of a priority. Things like that are what allow me to improve the effort we get out of the team.
Yesterday - Abandonment
The action is to stop squandering resources on obsolete businesses and focus people on new opportunities. In security my priorities are constantly shifting. We’ll start working on thing and then have to abandon that for something of a higher priority. The hope is that we can come back to that prior thing. Some times though we have to abandon it all together. I’ve started doing this with our work tickets. We’ll have stale tickets on the board for something. I’ve started having the team closing those tickets if the task is way down on the priority list or at a point where we are waiting on something that may never come. If it does come back we can simply reopen the ticket. It keeps the board fresh and moving.
Today - Practice of Abandonment
Action ask the question, “If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we know, go into it now?” Abandon if the answer is no. One of the ideas that has stuck with me about abandonment is what Google does. They invest in all sorts of ideas. The teams rewarded the most are those that fail fast. Meaning that if they see it isn’t working out they abandon it. The reasons is that there are already sunk costs. To continue to pursue it is only a waste. A famous example of that is Google Glasses. They were around for a hot minute and then became non-existent almost immediately. There were too many problems and plug was pulled quickly.