Management Nugget No 15: “Maximum Parallel Streams”

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.

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