Prioritising

What should you focus on now? I’m going thru some ways of creating value thru setting the right priorities.

Switching focus in the middle of the task is the worst thing for most developers, and perhaps also other employees. As a CTO or anyone leading developers your job is to either thru the Product Manager/Owner (or yourself if you take that role) setup a sustainable working environment which allows for employees to be able to contribute in a way that maximises the business value of their output. That sounded nice!

What I mean is that there are tons of task lists, boards, to-dos, follow-ups, excel sheets and ticket handling systems which tries to support business in project management and task handling. In fact I think there are too many.

ONE LIST TO RULE THEM ALL

In the first book of Lord of The Rings (LOTR) – I promise to not make any other LOTR-references – we get introduced to the almighty powerful ring — one ring that will rule them all. In order to make business prioritisation - we need one list to rule them all. I’ll explain why.

Many teams work different, with different priorities and sometimes for different stakeholders or “bosses”. We tried to make the teams cross-functional but it quickly became evident that they needed to focus on one product in order to not have very long wait times for the other stakeholders. So we tried to focus everyone in a classic Agile Scrum Sprint.

That worked as long as no other “boss” came in and asked someone in the team for something they needed “now” or until the employee was finished. Then what would they work on? They took up another task and wasn’t ready until the Sprint was supposed to be delivered.

That’s a bit of background to why I recommend having a Backlog and working with Kanban. One list. Only one. Not two. One.

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