I'm too busy to do anything

Once I managed the development of the project and faced a strange situation: every day I did more and more, but things only increased. The more I stayed at work, the more I did not have time. As a result, when the fog cleared, I found that I was doing very different things in which I did not have the proper competence: translations, analytics, technical writing, testing, development, and on different platforms, staff search, hiring and directly managing the development. The situation, to put it mildly, is deplorable. It should be noted that this was the first project that I managed and, probably, experienced managers my mistakes seem idiotic, and the conclusions are naive. But, in any case, in order to systematize the experience, I conducted a retrospective and I want to test its conclusions with the help of the community.

Further, I bring all the factors I have found that have led me to such an unpleasant state of affairs.

Mistrust


What is the easiest way to unload yourself? Of course, delegating part of the responsibilities to someone else. But, as long as you do not trust the members of your team, you cannot do this. How can you transfer a responsible function to a person whom you do not trust? After all, then you will not be sure of the result. I think this kind of problem is commonplace for managers who have left ordinary employees. They think that besides them no one else can do the job as well and therefore can not trust even the most responsible, let alone irresponsible. Which leads to an increase in the workload of the leader himself.

So, to delegate responsibilities, you must trust your team. And in order to trust your team, you need to take its formation and organization of processes seriously.

Conclusions:

  • When forming a team, it must be borne in mind that some of the employees will make responsible decisions and they will need to be given freedom of action. Therefore, when hiring, you need to pay attention to a candidate who is ready to take responsibility and take the initiative.
  • Giving freedom to make decisions to key personnel.
  • Establish self-organization. Self-organization tools can be taken from the same scrum: sprint planning, preparation for sprint planning, daily planning sessions and, most importantly, retrospective. These tools will make the development process more transparent and detect problems and errors earlier.

These measures will reduce the workload of the leader, allow him to look at the development process from the outside and take up his main responsibility - the organization of work.

Recruitment Authority


It would be very good to hire the right people in the right amount, right now. But there may not be authority to replace some employees exposed by the investor. And the understanding of the need for replacement may not be so clear as to insist on the investor.

Conclusions:

  • Credentials are discussed prior to the start of the project, so that there will be no stalemate in the future.
  • Even when official authority is not enough, you can always try to convince, but for this it is necessary to be able to negotiate. And this skill turns out quite a long and painful.

Appropriate staff is the key to the effective allocation of responsibilities in a team.

Micromanagement


Lack of necessary personnel and distrust creates micromanagement. You, as a responsible but inexperienced leader, are trying to look over each employee’s shoulder and monitor his work, and sometimes even say how he should do his job. Thus, a very unfavorable situation arises in the team: employees begin to consider the leader the last asshole, sticking his nose where he should not, and stop taking responsibility for good. A much better approach is to independently choose the path for key employees, provided that they understand the mission and immediate goal.

Conclusions:

  • Give the team a mission, a vision for the project, and an immediate goal. It’s much easier to explain where we are going than to control everyone’s gait. In addition, this creates trust in the team, unless of course tools are used to organize the team and cross-control like scrum.
  • The immediate goal should be SMART. Only in this case can it be guided every day, to determine which tasks correspond to it and which do not.

Out of focus


About the goals it is worth mentioning additionally. Few people use SMART goals to formulate software product requirements. Often the formation of requirements starts from the very end - directly from the requirements. For example, there is a requirement to make a register of records for paid services. You can make a calendar with a choice of dates, display of free and busy time, the ability to make an arbitrary number of entries at the same time. at the same time, several specialists can be admitted, confirming the recording by a specialist, indicating the list of services, the ability to change the list of services after recording, etc. And get a decent recording function for an appointment, which can be used in almost all conceivable cases! But is it worth creating this complicated functionality, if the goal is to create a simple appointment for specialists conducting an individual appointment and providing only one service? In this case, a calendar with dates and the ability to choose a time with a custom recording step and a custom reception duration is enough. An explicit and precisely formulated goal can save you from unnecessary waste of energy.

But there is another problem born of the absence of a formulated goal - the desire to achieve several unformed goals at once. A goal is better to achieve in turn. I will give an analogy from strategy games: first, a stream of resources (gold, crystals) is created, then the army begins to build. If you first build a hut, then you will have neither money nor an army. First, it is worth achieving one goal, and putting the results of its achievement into the foundation to achieve the next.

Conclusions:

  • The stated SMART goal allows you to avoid unnecessary work.
  • Goals should be achieved in turn. For clarity of the distant future, you can create a goal tree, where, for example, your mission or global goal lies at the root, and SMART goals are the leaves.

Lack of training


As a result of the above problems, we come to a situation where the current work completely absorbs you and does not allow you to look at your actions from the side. You repeat your actions over and over and the only way you see is to do the same thing only BIGGER and FULLER. You are no longer aware that it is the repetition of learned actions that is the cause of the current state of affairs. And in order to change the current state of affairs, it is necessary to start acting differently.

Conclusions:

  • Even in difficult times, you need to learn. For example, to allocate an hour of working time for reading books - this will allow you to see new, more promising management models.
  • Conduct retrospectives. This event allows you to learn the whole team for a relatively small price. But there is a nuance - a qualitative retrospective, where people talk about real problems and are not afraid to express their thoughts, can be achieved only in conditions of psychological security, where everyone respects everyone despite possible disagreements.

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