Recently I rebuilt this blog and noticed many things that I had learnt in the past and had since forgotten, and since I am in a new type of role at my new client I thought I would start writing down all the bits and bobs that I am seeing and dealing with from a senior management point of view, this is while I still retain the twin view points of “doer” / Tech and Manager
All of these nuggets have been thought of many times by many people, and no doubt they exist in a thousand books on the subjects of project and man management, but they are new to me and I’m finding them by trial and error as I interact with two worlds
I would like to make massively clear that these are not from any one company or any one industry, it is accumulated stuff I have picked up working with clients big and small, with people good and bad over the last three decades of corporate life.
Nugget 1: you can’t run teams at 100% and then ask “surges” of them
Explanation:
If you have a set of teams that you’re constantly pushing to “go go go”, “now now now”, and running them at full speed you CANNOT then on top of that add things that have to be done TODAY, what you’re doing is giving them impossible goals (which produces a constant feeling of failure in the people under your care), burning them out and damaging their opinion of you, as handling or “Managing” these situations IS YOUR JOB.
If you cannot control the surges (say its part of your industry that they happen e.g. retail at xmas) then you have to run at a lower % utilisation for the none crisis times.