Our mission is to help engineers love their jobs. It’s what we do. So what makes people love their jobs?
Gallup gathered data from over a million employees and discovered the top two indicators of engagement: “Are my expectations clear?” and “Do I have the materials and equipment to do my job?” If you can answer “yes” to those two questions, you’re on your way to having happy teams.
Simple. Well, not really... If you are working in product development—with complex projects, multiple stakeholders, and invisible work—teams are being pulled in so many directions they don’t know which way is up, let alone what their number one priority is each day. This creates a lot of stress, and the wrong priorities create delays. And the delays create more stress. You get the picture, and may be living it right now.
Clear Expectations and Adequate Resources
So how do you solve the problem of clear expectations and adequate resources, and create an environment where people love their work? The solution is for each person to have clear and correct priorities every day, for all of their projects.
And there is an additional benefit to working this way: Your projects move forward a lot faster— sometimes 75% faster.
So how do you solve for the complexity of product development and get the answer to this very important question? It takes a combination of the right tool and the right methodology.
We think the answer lies in using Playbook (of course) combined with a hybrid methodology derived from Lean, Agile, and Theory of Constraints.
The methods were derived from the following eight principles. Click on each of the links to get more information.
- Clear and correct priorities
- Decentralized planning
- Rolling wave planning
- Shared project buffers
- Fast feedback
- Capacity loading
- Enabling teams pull their task from the queue of work
- Making queues (and work) visible
Or if you want to see it in action, check out the video below about the number one cause of project delays. And then watch Part Two to see how Playbook solves for this problem.
Related articles
Lean project management
Lean project management methodology
Lean project management Kanban
Lean project management principles
Lean project management resource management
Lean project management Pull vs. push
Lean project management task management
Lean project management and shared project buffers
Lean project management and decentralized planning
Daily stand-up meetings
Guide to Lean Project Management
Guide to Lean Product Development
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