I run two small teams (IT operations and customer support) at an in-house digital media agency of a larger corporation. We’re a cost center, i.e. we work within a budget and have (almost) no way of adding margins to our internal rates for product design and other strategic topics. And – theoretically – we need to always have our staff run at 100% capacity as only then are they fully funded. Still, among all this we’ve managed to somehow spend time designing (and refining) our core project management and delivery processes and to be quite successful doing so. That is, until about a year ago.
Since then it increasingly feels like we’ve become a victim of that very success. The number of projects we are asked to do has risen so fast that we are now close to trippling our staff in just a little over two years. Yet still we are more than maxed out in terms of capacity, with some members working weekends on what is becoming a regular basis. While particular teams are more affected by this than others, frustration levels are rising with everyone, the quality of our products and customer support are declining, and deadlines are being missed more and more. Additionally, we’ve outgrown the software tools we use to handle work item tracking and handover, time tracking, project management, and reporting to senior management and customers. In fact, we’re abusing some of the tools to an extent that makes work harder and more frustrating for everyone instead of making our lives easier.
And now, just this past week, the development team lead informed me – almost casually on the side – that for a new and very complex project the development leadership team has decided to not use our existing work item tracking, but instead will go with another open source solution they’ve started to play around with. To me, this quick-and-dirty approach to solve a problem by quickly adding another software tool (it would actually be our third task tracking software used in parallel) is symptomatic for an underlying, much more serious problem we’re facing: we’ve run out of time to think; specifically, time to think strategically.
It’s not like we didn’t know until last week that our work item tracking software was cumbersome to use, that our time tracking software is a real pain, that we’re abusing our project management software, and that we’ve turned to store data in systems it doesn’t belong for the sake of reporting, instead of changing the reports to reflect the data. And we got to have most of these tools by the same process as above: quick-and-dirty solutions to symptoms instead of detailed analysis of the root problems followed by careful evaluation and strategic decision-making in choosing the right tools for the right jobs.
And don’t get me wrong: I’m part of this system, and as one of the extended leadership team, I’m as much to blame for this situation as every other team lead. It’s not particular team members I blame as much as our common mindset regarding this. We should never have come to this point, for we should have thought strategically ahead a year (or more) ago and said: hey, our tools and processes won’t fit our future situation, let’s change and adapt them.
We have to face it: nobody will just give us the time needed for this strategic thinking. As team leads it is our job to make sure we take that time, period. Yes, we’ll probably have to argue and fight for it, but we desperately need it. Our company desperately needs it. For if we continue to throw quick-fixes at symptoms like we do now, we’ll soon drown in frustration and our customers will look elsewhere.