Most of your company’s problems are people problems. It’s not that the people themselves are the problems (usually). Rather it's the relationships between people that causes issues. Differences in communication preferences, working styles, emotional maturity and motivations can act as friction points, impacting productivity. These matters often go unnoticed or unacknowledged.
Nailed it. It is so important to consider the underlying culture and process issues so that the right solutions are implemented or built. The impulse to rush to fixing before taking the time to really diagnose can lead to so much wasted time and effort. Great article!
I could think of so many concrete examples of seeing these problems and the software that would magically solve it. I think that a lot of the time, the problems and software solutions are identified by managers and then the team is expected to implement and solve, which as you mentioned, doesn't help when the issue is actually a difficult personality, competing priority, or unrealistic timeline. So now the issue remains AND the team is tasked with additional administrative work (that they don't have time to deal with).
And especially when combined with this consideration you shared:
Are managers and leadership going to use this product or are they expecting teams to continue to provide updates in more manual ways e.g. status slide decks, end of week emails? Which process/expectation/behaviour needs to change to prevent duplication of work?
At the end of the day, project management and communication are huge tasks that take much more time than people probably expect. I don't think that time is often accounted for in time estimates.
Nailed it. It is so important to consider the underlying culture and process issues so that the right solutions are implemented or built. The impulse to rush to fixing before taking the time to really diagnose can lead to so much wasted time and effort. Great article!
I could think of so many concrete examples of seeing these problems and the software that would magically solve it. I think that a lot of the time, the problems and software solutions are identified by managers and then the team is expected to implement and solve, which as you mentioned, doesn't help when the issue is actually a difficult personality, competing priority, or unrealistic timeline. So now the issue remains AND the team is tasked with additional administrative work (that they don't have time to deal with).
And especially when combined with this consideration you shared:
Are managers and leadership going to use this product or are they expecting teams to continue to provide updates in more manual ways e.g. status slide decks, end of week emails? Which process/expectation/behaviour needs to change to prevent duplication of work?
At the end of the day, project management and communication are huge tasks that take much more time than people probably expect. I don't think that time is often accounted for in time estimates.