12 Too many yardsticks

 

This chapter covers

  • Setting team goals
  • Setting up a work intake system for your team
  • Handling unplanned work
  • Deciding what to work on

The power of an organization is centered on the idea of a group of people coming together to complete a task that would be impossible to complete as individuals. Organizations have the ability to direct a group of people toward a single objective, and they use priorities to do this. Creating a skyscraper would be incredibly difficult without a group of people, skills, and disciplines coalescing around a set of prioritized goals.

But many teams tend to not coalesce around the overall goal, but instead around their specific slice of that goal. That slice gets prioritized above the overall team goal. As the slices become more specific, so do the ways in which you measure them. Before long, you have a bunch of different means of measuring the performance of the teams, and those means may incentivize behavior that detracts from the overall goal. This is the too many yardsticks antipattern.

12.1 Tiers of goals

12.1.1 Organizational goals

12.1.2 Departmental goals

12.1.3 Team goals

12.1.4 Getting the goals

12.2 Consciousness around what you work on

12.2.1 Priority, urgency, and importance

12.2.2 The Eisenhower decision matrix

12.2.3 How to say no to a commitment

12.3 Structuring your team’s work

12.3.1 Time-slice your work

12.3.2 Populating the iteration

12.4 Unplanned work

12.4.1 Controlling unplanned work

12.4.2 Dealing with unplanned work

Summary

Wrapping it all up