You can collect work only in your immediate sphere of influence. That’s because you don’t know what people two levels up or down from you are actually doing. If you’re a first-level manager, you can ask each person in your group what they are working on. But the more middle- or senior-level management you are, the more you have to work through your staff. Explain what you want to know and how you want to see it.
You might even use the next few paragraphs to help them understand.
Don’t be afraid to depend on others to help collect the work; be clear on what you want to see.
KNOW WHATWORK TOCOLLECT 41
As you collect your work or as you ask others to collect theirs, remem- ber to look at all five categories of work—periodic work, ongoing work, emergency work, management work, and project work—to see who’s doing what in your portfolio, as inBehind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management [RD05]. Although you might think of project work first, remember all the other work, too.
Some of your work is organized by time:
• Periodic work, such as monthly reports or yearly budgets or train- ing or vacation. If it’s something you need to do at a specific time but is not part of a project, it’s periodic work.
• Ongoing work, such as support for the operation of an organiza- tion or department. You might need to check on the status of a product owner building a product backlog. You might not want to make this periodic (every Tuesday at 11 a.m.), but you don’t want to forget it.
• In-process ad hoc work, such as emergency projects, work you are doing as the result of crises, or other surprises.
In addition, you have work organized by intent:
• Management work, such as meetings with your managers, peers, or staff; strategic planning; coaching; feedback; coordinating the work of other people—anything that helps you make a decision about who should do what and when. You don’t need to be a man- ager to perform “management” work.
• Project work, such as the project to save the company, a hotfix, or work to determine whether you want to acquire another orga- nization. Projects are not limited to technical staff. A project has a specific objective and a projected end date.
Once you gather all the work, you can organize it week by week and person by person so you can see what’s really going on.
KNOW WHATWORK TOCOLLECT 42 One way to do this is to make a chart like this:
Tasks Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4
Unstaffed work
Make a yellow sticky of each piece of work you are supposed to do. If you are working on a project for several weeks, make a sticky for that project for each week. Put all the stickies in the appropriate week, above the “Unstaffed work” line. Just get them all in.
If you’re a middle or senior manager, ask the managers who work for you to do this with their groups also. I suggest you start this as a person-by-person bottom-up activity so you can see what each per- son in the organization is doing and planning to do for the next few weeks. This will provide you with an early warning of multitasking or emergency projects. When you start with the projects and work down, people sometimes forget all the other little pieces of work, and it’s more difficult to see the multitasking.
If you are working on just one project, especially if your project is using timeboxes of up to four weeks and you work feature by feature so you finish valuable work at the end of each timebox, this is a trivial step.
However, even if you’re working in an agile way or if you’re working on several projects, collect all your work anyway. You need to see what other people expect of you.
IS THEWORK APROJECT OR APROGRAM? 43
Turn Ongoing Work into Periodic Work
I admit it, I forget things unless I’ve written them down. I’m espe- cially bad with ongoing work, which is why I like to turn ongoing work into periodic work as quickly as possible.
If you know you need to check on something, schedule it as a periodic to-do in your calendar, on the same day of the week and at the same time, and make it a repeating task. When I’m a manager, I do this with one-on-ones. When I’m a project manager, I turn my informal check-withs into repeating tasks.
A check-with is “Check with Ted to see whether he’s updating the backlog for the next iteration’s planning.” If you realize you don’t need to do this task this week, that’s great. You’ve freed yourself from a task. If you don’t need to do it three times in a row, maybe you don’t need to do it at all. Or, maybe you change the periodicity of it.
Now, be honest with yourself, and put the work you can’t do in a given week into the unstaffed work row. Now you have something to discuss with your manager or your customers. You may have to say no to some work, as in Section6.6,How to Say No to More Work, on page93.