Over the last fortnight, I’ve ramped up my team from 2.5 people to 11.5. The newbies are all on temporary contracts and the work is, honestly, pretty dull.
It’s a data cleansing project which has a lot of manual work. The guys (meaning guys and gals where I come from) are temps. I know some people would manage the new staff – especially since they’re temps with no apparent loyalty to the company – by setting up a system to force them to work as hard as possible – setting difficult objectives, measuring them, clocking-in and clocking-out, that sort of thing.
But I don’t know how to manage like that.
And, more to the point, I don’t think it works.
Why? Because, whenever I’ve been managed like that I’ve ended up hating the job and only putting in the minimum effort to survive until I could find another job. I think most people are the same.
So, instead I’m trying to set the team up so that the guys can manage and organize themselves. They’re bright and enthusiastic people, they have a broad variety of experience and are a fun bunch. Why not exploit their inherent energy and give them the chance to do a good job?
-oOo-
I knew they were a good bunch when they started getting grumpy with me on the first day. They didn’t have enough work to do (because I was the bottleneck), but even if they did they didn’t have any user ids. They were looking at me the same way a pack of starving dogs looks at rump steak – THEY WANTED WORK.
I managed to find them some work that didn’t require user ids, but UNFORTUNATELY, they were too keen, they worked too hard and they kept running out of work. THEY WANTED WORK.
They didn’t want to sit around surfing the inherent. And more so, they didn’t want to get in trouble for sitting around surfing the Internet.
THEY WANTED WORK.
-oOo-
I think that when most people go to work they WANT TO DO A GOOD JOB. If they aren’t doing a good job it’s not because they are inherently lazy and un-trustworthy, it’s usually because the system that they work in doesn’t allow them to do their best and/or they’re not trusted.
If I didn’t find them work then their enthusiasm would wane, they’d fill in their hours, but they’d hate it. They’d surf the inherent and muck about. Who could blame them?
-oOo-
I’ve always found that I am work best when:
- I have a clear WHAT but I get to choose HOW;
- I have the satisfaction of doing a good job and I can see that I’m doing a good job;
- I get to do what I’m good at
- There’s some sense of urgency
- Someone thanks me every so often
So we had a meeting. The newbies had already created the sense or urgency – they wanted work. The problem was that I was the bottleneck to them getting work. We had to do something about this.
The first part of the meeting was to establish WHAT had to be done, which was quite straight forward.
The second part of the meeting was to figure out HOW to manage that work getting done. I had in my mind that I want to manage it in a scrum-like way, but I didn’t want to impose this because, to be honest, I’m not great at organizing these sorts of things. So, I asked the team to figure out how to do it. And they did, by themselves, with only a little nudging from me.
And guess what they came up with … a modification on the Scrum model. We have a list in Excel (product backlog) which I and our customer (i.e. the product owners) are to add to, delete from and re-prioritize, then each week they would take a chunk off the top of the list and do it. We have another list of lower priority work that they can do and self-manage, if/when we product owners can’t keep the first list full.
Since some tasks are far too big for one person to do by themselves in a short time frame, we decided that we’d need to assign an owner to each task but that it was still the teams responsibility to make sure it gets done. We figured that some people would enjoy owning tasks but that others wouldn’t – so we made that role optional and we’ll leave the organization up to them. Later next week, I’m going to start doing short daily stand up meetings.
-oOo-
So … this has been a long post, mostly for my own benefit – I want to reflect by writing about my week. I’ve contemplated chucking this, but maybe there are some good ideas here. Nothing new, but still good.
It’s very early days but I hope it works – I think that it all boils down to me living up to my end of the bargain.
