Nugget 14: “There is a maximum number of parallel streams any team can take before slowing delivery”

Explanation:

Every project and organisation has multiple parallel work streams and often multiple ones are high priority. Despite what people will say you cant make them into a simple 1.2.3 list, this does not make any logical sense after all if you go to a granular enough detail you will be able to find out which of 2 tasks is more important than another, but it does make practical political sense, i.e. you are simply not going to be able to politically hold off one person who wants their task done while you fully complete something else that is only a little bit more important elsewhere , you HAVE to show some progress on both items.

So while people at the Coalface might be upset and push back on you to put them in an order, there are times you wont be able to do that ,and the team is going to have to parallel process. 

HOWEVER it is your job to ensure that the actual number of streams that you are running simultaneously is not beyond your team’s capacity to cope with.

For me the definition of “too many” is when the administration load of flipping between streams and areas of decision, actually means that your total delivery time noticeably goes down.

Your definition of this might vary according to the different type of work you’re doing. For example, you might have developers that can only cope with one deliverable at once. So therefore, you can only have as many streams as you have developers. But ultimately, your job as a manager is to determine this. you have to run the balancing act of accepting more work and not appearing restrictive as a team. and knowing when if you accept one more thing, even when pressed by a senior manager, the delivery of all of your other items will suffer and ultimately the project will be damaged, at this point gather your evidence and hold firm with you senior manager, while presenting the best options you can.

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

This article came from a question asked by a young software developer. Recently out of university he was challenging a decision that I had made for how his time was to be spent and the methodology used to allocate that time.

The thing is, that everything he challenged and everything he said was utterly, utterly true. But also not practical. So I faced up and instead of giving him the normal platitude answer or just ordering him as his boss, I gave him the complete and utter truth.

Being a smart human he accepted it. He didn’t like it, but he did understand and accept it. and it came to me that we really should lay this kind of truth out more. It’s probably already been laid out in thousands of books already, but I want to lay it out in a way that makes sense to me, so here we go.

In any large organisation there are 3 basic zones of decision and information.

The Coalface:

Zone one, the operational zone, or as we will call it “The Coalface”. This is the zone where the truth lays, where actual work is done. This is where you sell to customers. This is where you deal with real data. This is where you deal with the minutiae of small problems,

If you live in this zone your main issue is that you are so close to the immediate needs of your problems and their delivery that large scale threats are tricky to see.

The Fantasy Zone:

Zone three, the upper zone, which I’m going to call the Fantasy Zone, This is where dreams come from. Goals are designed, The big thinking, the blue sky decisions, all that kind of stuff, where the directors live.

Its main issue is that the people who live here often have no idea of the impact their wishes have elsewhere and in the worst cases they don’t care, also its residents are so used to people telling them they are right, they start to think that any decision they make will by definition ALWAYS be right.

( The Audio clip is from the arcade game Space Harrier, which I always think of when I hear the words “Fantasy Zone” ) 

The DMZ:

And the middle zone, which we will call the DMZ. This is where management skulk.

Their true job is to convert real life issues into the simple statements that the senior people can understand, and by response turn the blue-sky thinking that directors come up with into actions that make logical sense to people at the Coalface

Its main issue is that people in this zone, spend so much of their time trying to smooth out and simplify the real work hump/bumps and delays that happen in the coal face that they end up believing that a happy fantasy zone resident IS the actual deliverable, rather than a genuine quality product or result.

The Problem:

So now the question is, how do we solve this problem of different people with different perspectives working together?

And I think the answer is, you can’t!.

Humans are humans. Humans are weird. You will not get people to prioritise other peoples problems over their own. All we can do is to give them better communication and the opportunity to work in a less self centred way and show them the advantages of doing such.

From one side we can explain the issues to the people in the Coalface, that the Fantasy zone are facing.

Let us take our young software developer as an example. He wanted to know why we were breaking with the most efficient way to solve a long term problem, And the reason we were breaking it, was that we had a short term delivery that we had to meet. The short term delivery was purely a Fantasy zone delivery, it made no difference to the coalface but as the money that needed to be allocated to the coalface came from the Fantasy zone and this short term deliverable was a threat to that money. Then the Fantasy zone’s short term delivery overrode the most efficient long term solution in the coalface, a point of view that people in different zones can work with.

And understanding going the other way is just as important. One of the core parts of understanding that the fantasy zone needs to grasp is that all the members of the coal face are not interchangeable cogs. They’re all humans with foibles. The fantasy zone members may not like that. But there are holiday time periods for people that are at the coalface that force things to go on slowdown. There are difficulties in yanking people up and moving everybody wholesale to a different problem that will damage long agreed delivery times, etc etc, they might not need to get into the nitty grtty, but they should understand real world problems in broad brush strokes,

People in the DMZ have to take on this responsibility. and rather than just going for a meeting and hoping to escape with only kind words from the fantasy zone, you will occasionally have to bite the bullet and provide detailed information on Coalface issues to help one zone understand another.

As a final fun note, I was so pleased with the neatness of “Welcome to the Fantasy Zone, Get ready!” that I wanted a t-shirt of it, thankfully there is a great redbubble one 

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.