Friday Afternoon

Sam arrived at Conference Room A at 2:55. When he entered the room, Patty was already there, with her head in a book.

Patty looked up. “Oh, hi. I was taking advantage of a few quiet minutes to review my problem set for tomorrow’s class.”

“Oh, your class for your degree?” Sam asked, as he started covering the wall with flip-chart paper.

“Yep, it’s a challenge to do all my class work and my work work,” Patty sighed, as she closed her book and gathered up her notes.

Jason strolled in, folders in hand. “I’m ready for this. I’ve got the lists of everything that’s going on in my group.”

Kevin shuffled in after Jason. He griped, “My group is overloaded. I’ve been helping out, but there’s still too much to do.” He plunked himself down at the conference table. “But don’t worry, we will do what we need to do.”

At 3:05 PM, Ginger arrived in a flurry. “Sorry I’m late,” she called. “Meetings!”

“Yep, we all love meetings. Let’s get started on this one. We’re here to figure out all the work we as a group have to do and what we can’t do right now,” Sam said. “I’ve drawn a matrix up here on the wall.”

“I know I need more people!” Ginger blurted out.

Sam nodded to Ginger. “We’re going to look at all our work and determine how to proceed as a team,” Sam responded.

“I’d like each of you to fill in this matrix with the work your teams are doing." (See Figure 1, ​Start of a portfolio​.)

---

Figure 1. Start of a portfolio

"I’ve listed the names of everyone in the area, grouped by functional area. Let’s start by listing each person’s tasks for the next three weeks. Who wants to go first?”

“I’ll go,” said Ginger. Ginger strode to the wall, list in hand. She filled in ‘GUI Coding’ across all four weeks for six of her people. For the other two, she listed ‘Focus Groups’ for Week 1 and 2 and ‘GUI Coding’ for Week 3 and 4.

“Can you be more specific than ‘GUI coding’?” asked Sam. Ginger looked surprised. “More specific? But ‘GUI coding’ is what they’re doing. My team is hard at work writing GUI code based on the marketing requests. I trust that they’re doing the right thing.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you don’t trust your people. We need the detail so we can understand what everyone is doing and what the priorities are. Is any of this work for previous releases or future releases?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Ginger said.

Kevin volunteered to go next. “We’re always crunched in Middleware,” he said. Kevin started listing the work for his group. “There are four major projects in my group. I assign everyone 25% to each project.” Kevin wrote small to fit the four project titles into each box. Sam said, “How do people know what to work on first when they’re working on four projects at the same time?”

“They juggle,” Kevin frowned, puzzled by Sam’s question.

“How about you, Jason?” Sam asked.

Jason stood up and started filling in the work for his group. “I’m going to have to double-check this. My list is based on last month’s status report.”

Jason broke down the work as 50% support and 50% development and wrote notes for each one. “I’ve got two people working on development, and the other seven are working on reports when they aren’t on support issues.”

“We can work with what you have now, but for the next round we’ll need an up-to-date task list. What’s driving the support?” Sam asked.

Jason grimaced. “A lot of it’s leftover from the last release. We’re helping the Operations people through some manual workarounds and finishing a couple of features that we implemented halfway in the last release.”

Patty was the last to approach the wall. “I only have one week of work to post. I have four people who are reliable and can do what they take on. But the other three—I just can’t tell with them. So, I evaluate the work every week to see whether I need to reassign it.

“That’s a tough nut to crack. Let’s talk about that in our one-on-one this week.” Sam stood and turned to the board.

“We’ve made great progress today, and we need more details. I’m going to schedule another meeting to continue this work. Let me review our actions from this meeting. These are the items we need to have completed before the next meeting.

“Ginger, you’re going to develop more specific descriptions of your group’s work, yes?” Ginger nodded.

“Kevin, you’re going to find out how people determine what to work on first.” Kevin dipped his head.

“Jason, you’re going to break down the support and development into more specific tasks, right?

“Patty, you define all the work your group can complete in the next three weeks, and we’ll deal with the work assignment later.

“We have our one-on-ones scheduled for Monday, so we can talk more about your specific situations in those meetings. I’ll schedule the follow-up meeting to continue this work on Tuesday. I’ll take the flip charts back to my office with me, and we can continue working with our matrix when we reconvene.”

As Sam met with each of his managers on Monday, he coached them on how to develop a more detailed picture of the work in their groups. Patty and Ginger decided to talk to everyone individually because people in their groups worked on small, independent projects. Kevin decided to gather the data in a group meeting—his team’s work was interdependent. Jason chose to meet separately with his two groups because their work was different in nature: one group worked on development, and the other supported deployed products.

When Sam met with Patty, he discovered another problem. Patty didn’t want to be a manager. She explained that she’d agreed to move into the management role temporarily, and wanted to return to technical work. Sam and Patty scheduled a meeting to discuss the move. Until she transitioned, Sam knew he’d need to coach Patty to perform the management work in her group.