Category: Productivity

What is a team?

A couple of months ago I gave a series of talks on creating team charters. As part of my preparation for this piece of work I asked myself a number of questions about what a team actually was, and what sorts of questions teams should be asking themselves regularly. Some of this content was used in the talks, but I’ve tried to make this article more about teams than team charters, as I’ve written and talked about these a lot elsewhere.

What is a team?

A team is a group of people who collaborate to deliver value. Value is anything that a customer would pay for.

A team doesn’t have to all report to the same person, or do the same kind of work, they just need to be able to combine their skills and expertise in a way that delivers something that someone else finds valuable.

Why does the team exist?

Each team should understand why is exists, and be able to articulate that in a short phrase. This should be a mission statement (what you do now), but may also incorporate elements of a vision statement (what you hope to achieve).

You should also understand who your stakeholders are, both the people you deliver work to, and the people outside the team who you depend on for things that you need. Ideally a team should be able to control everything it requires to deliver value, but this is unlikely to be the case in most organisations, and you are likely to have stakeholders who provide data centres, networks, offices or financial processes. Think about everything you need to do your work, and work out where it comes from, and how to get enough of it for what you need to do.

What skills does a team need?

That depends very much on what the team are responsible for delivering, but can be split into 3 main categories:

  • Subject matter expertise
  • Organisational skills
  • Leadership and management skills

These skills should be present across the team, but it’s fine for one person to have aspects of all three. What you don’t want is people who don’t have any of these skills, as they will find it harder to contribute meaningfully to the team.

How many people should be in the team?

That very much depends on what skills the team needs, and how those skills are distributed between individuals.

I like teams of 4-6 people, because they are small enough to make collective decisions quickly, but large enough to realistically contain a good mix of skills and experience. I may also add 1-2 interns, graduate trainees or apprentices, especially if the work being delivered would benefit from the unique experience people at the start of their career will bring. It’s also a good way to ensure that people starting out are being given a positive experience about what it’s like to be in a team.

How do we empower a team to be self-organising?

A self-organising team understands what it is there to do, and receives work from customers rather than managers. It prioritises work based on what value it adds to one or more customers, but also improves how the work is done so that valuable work is delivered more often. It is free to make decisions on how the work is done, providing any institution-wide restrictions are factored in. The larger the institution, the more likely a team will be restricted in some of the tools it uses, or in where and when it works, but it is still worth thinking about these things and contributing expertise towards redefining the institutional standard, rather than just using something different and then struggling to collaborate with other teams.

Working in this way can require a bit of unlearning, especially for people who hold leadership or management roles. An understanding of the key principles of Agile can help with this, as very often ceremonies associated with Agile (especially Scrum) are used to plan and deliver work in a self-organising team.

How does leadership and management work in a self-organising team?

In a traditional team you would expect the team manager to provide all (or most) of the leadership. management, and organisational skills, but also a fair amount of subject matter expertise. In an agile team we still need all of those skills, but they are more likely to be split more evenly between different team members.

How this might work:

  • One person who has a primary responsibility for ensuring that the work the team does continues to provide value to customers.
  • One person who has a primary responsibility for providing an environment for the team to do their best work.
  • Several people with subject matter expertise, who also have enough leadership, management and organisational skills to ensure that they can deliver within their subject area without hitting blockers on a daily basis.

Ensuring the skills are more equally distributed helps the team when one of more people are on holiday or otherwise unavailable to work. It means that a team is better positioned to deal with things that might slow down delivery, and that the team is not reliant on one person for many different things.

What meetings should the team attend?

There are a number of internal meetings that we find useful:

  • Daily stand up, to ensure that we have a collective understanding of what we are doing each day, and that we can identify anything where we might need help
  • Sprint planning, so that we understand what is being delivered in the next 2 weeks, and who is doing what
  • Retrospectives, to enable us to scrutinise how we work, and suggest improvements that can be fed into the next cycle

We still conduct 121 meetings, but these are less like status update meetings, and more about personal and professional development. Meeting every day to talk about our work doesn’t make 121 meetings less important, it just means we can focus them more effectively.

What about all those other meetings we attend?

Review all meetings and regular time commitments to ensure they add value to customers or directly contribute to improving how the work is done:

  • Why do you attend the meeting?
  • What contributions do you generally make?
  • What outputs do you get from the meeting, and are they valuable?

These questions should help identify meetings that could be dropped in order to free up more time for collaboration and individual contributions.

It is expected that people with leadership and management responsibilities will attend more meetings that individual contributors, but that in general there will be less meetings than in a traditional hierarchical team. Managers should be protecting their teams from meetings where possible, but this does not mean that people should stop collaborating with other teams; just that they do it in a way that only the people who are directly contributing to the collaboration are involved.

Reflections on Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan

Reflecting on Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan (a book I have been reading and thinking about a lot recently), I think the concept of organisational debt is key. This would be anything where the way the work is being done slows down delivery or adds unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. In my organisation we have loads of this, and I wonder if we would do better at getting rid of it if we referred to it as debt.

I also found the list of aspects to consider when designing an organisational operating system matched quite closely to things I am already thinking of. These are listed on page 54:

  1. Purpose: The fundamental reason for the organisation’s existence beyond profit.
  2. Authority: How decisions are made and who has the power to make them.
  3. Structure: The organisation’s architecture, roles, and teams.
  4. Strategy: The approach for achieving the organisation’s goals and staying competitive.
  5. Resources: Allocation and management of the organisation’s assets.
  6. Innovation: The process and culture around new ideas and improvements.
  7. Workflow: How work gets done and processes are managed.
  8. Meetings: The role, frequency, and structure of gatherings.
  9. Information: How data is collected, shared, and utilised.
  10. Membership: How people join, leave, and belong to the organisation.
  11. Mastery: Development and growth of individual skills and capabilities.
  12. Compensation: How rewards and recognition are handled within the organisation.

So for example if processes were getting in the way of work being done, this could be classed as organisational debt logged against workflow. Or if retaining key staff was an issue then it could be logged against membership. If we come up with a problem statement that articulates the issue it might allow us to more clearly see what is slowing us down.

In the retention example above, the problem statement may actually draw out the fact that whilst retention is how it manifests, it’s actually because we don’t pay good people enough, which sits in the domain of compensation. Shining a light on particular pain points may allow us to start to address them in a meaningful way.

There are also two key concepts that come up throughout the book:

People Positive is a mindset that views people as inherently capable, trustworthy, and motivated. It challenges the traditional, often negative assumptions about human behaviour in the workplace, such as the belief that employees need constant oversight, strict rules, and external incentives to perform well. Instead, People Positive organisations believe that:

  • Inherent Potential: People have vast potential and, when given the right conditions, can achieve remarkable things.
  • Trust and Autonomy: Employees thrive when they are trusted and given autonomy to make decisions.
  • Intrinsic Motivation: People are motivated by more than just money; they seek purpose, mastery, and a sense of belonging.
  • Whole Person: Recognising that employees are whole people with lives outside of work, and that respecting this leads to better engagement and productivity.

Complexity Conscious refers to the understanding and acceptance that modern organisations operate in complex and dynamic environments. This mindset acknowledges that:

  • Non-linearity: Organisations are complex systems where small changes can have large, unpredictable effects.
  • Uncertainty and Adaptation: Predicting the future is inherently difficult, and organisations must be adaptable and resilient to thrive.
  • Emergent Solutions: Solutions often emerge from the collective input and interactions of individuals, rather than from top-down directives.
  • Interconnectedness: All parts of an organisation are interconnected, and changes in one area can impact others in unforeseen ways.
  • Continuous Learning: Emphasises the need for continuous learning and experimentation to navigate complexity.

I think both of these are key, and are a different way of thinking that many organisations could benefit from.

Including values and feelings in the yearly review

It’s yearly review time, and as usual I’m very much enjoying reflecting on all the great things my team have achieved over the last 12 months. There are a couple of fairly new things we have added to our yearly review process that help us focus on the right things, and make the conversations more meaningful to us:

The first is values-based objectives, where we identify behaviours that align with our values, and write objectives that will make us better at consistently demonstrating those behaviours. So if collaboration is a value, then we plan to work with some different people, or if we value transparency then we develop new ways to work in public and share our ideas and decisions as widely as possible. I love this kind of objective, and I think it helps keep the values front and centre throughout the year.

The second is a new one for this year. Over the last few weeks we have started to record how tasks we have completed made us feel, and not just how well they went. Building this into our retrospectives has led to some interesting insights, so we are going to do the same with our yearly objectives. No-one is likely to feel wholly positive about everything they do, but by at least thinking about it we can start to understand the type of work that we prefer, and the things that are likely to require a bit of extra motivation to start. We have been talking about things that make us grateful in our daily stand-up for a while, and this seems like a natural extension.

My Travel Setup

As we prepare to start our third year/season of splitting our time between Birmingham and the Isle of Wight, I thought it was about time I blogged about my current travel setup. In this context, “travel” mostly refers to what I use on the island, but also partly to what I use when I am somewhere that isn’t one of the usual paces I live or work.

Things I store here

Apart from the table and chair, I think I have had most of this stuff over a decade. But it still serves me well for 9 weeks of the year.

  • Desk riser – this is one of those adjustable ones that can convert any desk into a standing desk, but can also raise a laptop or monitor to the correct eye height
  • Folding table – slatted, so that it will break down into a small enough package that it can be easily stored
  • 24″ Monitor and cables – an old one that I’ve had over 10 years and that was replaced at home by something newer
  • Desk mat – because of the slats I need something to provide a surface that my laptop, keyboard and pointing device can sit on without moving around
  • Speakers – old Logitech ones that I used to use at home before I wired up my home computer with an amplifier and dedicated speakers
  • Extension lead – to power everything
  • Webcam – I do also travel with one, but if I am working here it’s really important to have one, and the webcam in my laptop is not good enough for work. This is a really old Microsoft one that we have quite a few of in various places
  • Folding chair – from B&M, and small enough to be storable. I used to use a patio chair, but I needed something that would be better for my posture
  • USB mouse – in case I forget my trackball
  • Amazon Basics USB hub, that I use to connect my keyboard, trackball and camera to whatever laptop I am using. It’s like a docking station, but cheap and old.

Things I carry with me

How Other People Work

After over 3 years of mostly remote working I very interested in seeing how other people set their home offices up for maximum productivity. I’ve made a lot of changes since the start of 2020, and I suspect many other people have as well. I had intentions a while ago to make a long list of people who have inspired me with their setups, but have only just got around to posting that list (which I will likely add to later).

Hopefully looking at these again will inspire me to consider if there are any changes I need to make to how I work.

Reddit, IT support, and home offices

I used Reddit quite a bit around a decade ago. Mostly for keeping up to date with Linux and other computer-related things, but also to understand the kind of things people were generally interested in and talking about (became small talk is a thing, and I’m terrible at it). I drifted away a few year ago, but since the first lockdown started I’ve found it a useful source of information about things I’m interested in.

This started when I was researching computer parts for my new desktop PC. I’ve not built a desktop for a long time, so I wanted to see what other people were doing, and how the parts shortage was going to affect the choices I made. I have my PC now, and I’m very pleased with it, but I also didn’t stop using Reddit at that point; I just stopped caring about PC hardware and tapped into the community expertise around my other current hobbies (customising the i3 window manager, Linux in general, mechanical keyboards, cycling, music). It’s interesting to see how other people are customising their computers and their keyboards, and it gives me ideas for changes I want to make to my own setup.

The time I’ve spent on Reddit has also reminded me of how much it’s used as a general support forum for all sorts of things. I try not to get too involved in that side of it, but I am very interested in the way people ask for help with their IT issues and it gives me some useful data to reflect on when I’m thinking about these things as part of my day job.

I’m in no way surprised that people are generally quite bad at describing the issues they are having, and also that they are very bad at choosing the right place to ask for help. I do have vague intentions to write up long answers to things that people seem to struggle with, probably starting with my insights on how people switching to Linux invariably start off with doing something really hard as part of their initial switch (dual-boot, Nvidia drivers, getting Windows software to work in the same way it does on Windows) and give up soon afterwards, not realising that everything else they will ever do isn’t going to be that hard to set up. That’s an essay for another day, but this is definitely a statement of intent.

I’m also starting to get quite interested in the way people have their home offices set up. After 18 months of mostly remote working, I’ll be returning part-time to the office next week, but am still very interested in seeing how other people set their home offices up for maximum productivity. I’ve made a lot of changes since the start of last year, and I suspect many other people have as well. I have intentions to make a long list of people who have inspired me with their setups, but that’s also a job for another day.

Data mining my working life

I’ve been collecting statistics on all sorts of aspects of my working day for a while now. I record how long my meetings last, who they are with, how much time it takes me to get to them, and also track how much time I spend on courses, at conferences, and engaged in any social activity that takes place at lunch time or straight after work. By collecting data I can hopefully spot trends (like attending far more meetings than usual), which helps me with planning my time, maintaining work life balance, and ensuring that I factor in recharging time between events that are likely to leave me feeing quite drained.

As I’ve been in my new role for four months now I thought it was worth trying to do some sort of comparison of things that are directly comparable (number of hours spend in meetings, average number of people at meetings I attend, that sort of thing). My hypothesis is that I seem to have more time for task based work than I have for a while, but I want to see if that’s actually true. I also want to try and devise an formula that will allow me to calculate the amount of mental energy any given week might require, and thus plan recharging activities appropriately.

To do this I started by listing all the activities I partake in that cost me energy (as an Introvert that’s anything involving other people). The list I came up with was:

  • Meetings involving me and one other person. I don’t find these particularly draining in general, and one to one conversation is actually my most comfortable medium for synchronous communication.
  • Meetings involving multiple other people – I find these quite tiring, especially if I’m chairing them or otherwise having to talk quite a lot.
  • Running training or coaching sessions. These can be quite tiring because I’m centre stage and talking for the duration of the session, and there may also be the added energy drain of having to field questions.
  • Attending courses, conferences or workshops. These generally involve meeting new people and taking in new skills and knowledge in an environment that generally doesn’t suit my learning style. This can be quite tiring, although sometimes I find group work exercises quite energising if it’s the right group.
  • Recruitment activity (interviews, recruitment exercises). One of my favourite activities, and although it tires me it’s always worth it.
  • Running events. Something else I enjoy, although sometimes I am far more into the planning, organising and evaluating of an event than anything else.
  • Social events that take place at lunch time or after work. These were recorded to see if there was any sort of correlation with other activities.

I have in no way done a full analysis yet, but from half a day spent plugging the data into Excel and Nvivo a few trends leap out straight away:

  • I spend about two working days a week in meetings, and have for most of the last few years. My monthly average never dips below a day and never rises above three days.
  • I work from home on average one day per fortnight, and only do planned work during this time. I’m much more likely to mark a task as finished during one of these days than any other day.
  • Travel time to meetings takes on average 5 minutes more in my current role. My commute is also 10 minutes longer. Using that extra time for thinking and ideas generation probably offsets the extra time spent walking though.
  • The average number of people in meetings I attend has risen steadily throughout the reporting period.
  • There is a definite correlation between the number of people at a meeting and whether I’m the organiser or not. Meetings I organise are generally with one or two other people; meetings I’m invited to average at least three people more. This is starting to even out a little over the last month or so though.
  • The opposite is true for social events taking place on week days, in that the larger the event the more likely it is I’ll have been involved in organising it, whereas meetings with one other person seem to be almost never initiated by me. There is probably a learning point there somewhere.
  • The key difference between my previous role and the one I’m doing now is that I don’t have direct reports and I do a lot less recruitment and training (both as a trainer and as the person being trained). That’s why I have more time to do everything else.
  • The amount of weekday socialising I’m doing has increased significantly over the last few months, and the activities I’m undertaking have diversified (although the majority is still food/drinks with one other person or a small group).
  • Most of my social activity is planned, rather than spontaneous.
  • There is a definite positive correlation between running events and socialising with people involved in the event afterwards. Even though both activities tire me, it’s rare to find one without the other.
  • There is a definite negative correlation between attending training sessions and social activity. The period in 2016 where I was juggling ILM5, Lean Six Sigma, and a bespoke training program was the period with the least social contact.
  • I leave the office more at lunch time now, and spend time between meetings in a coffee shop or quiet part of campus if it’s not worth going back to the office. I expect this will increase as the weather gets nicer.
  • I leave the office 15-20 minutes later than I did in my previous role, but my actual average working day duration has not differed significantly for years. The difference is down to the slightly longer breaks I’m taking, and the fact that my commute is longer.

There is a lot of food for thought there, and I’m starting to work out the energy requirements of the various activities (and combinations of activities) I undertake. My next step is to try and put some numerical modifiers against each activity so I can do a proper calculation, but that’s a job for another day.

Burnout, work-life balance and stress triggers

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but a couple of conversations over the last few weeks pushed it to the forefront of my mind again. What I want to talk about here is burnout (and what it looks like), how I try and maintain work-life balance, and stress triggers and how to mitigate them. What follows is a what works for me, but hopefully there is something there that would be of use to other people too.

Burnout

I’ve not had a traditional 9-5 job for a while, and I do tend to gravitate to roles where the work is never done, and where it would be easy to work significantly longer than is sensible. Jobs like that do lend themselves to the potential of burnout, and I’ve both suffered from this myself and seen it affect other people.

Wikipedia says “Burnout is a type of psychological stress. Occupational burnout or job burnout is characterized by exhaustion, lack of enthusiasm and motivation, feelings of ineffectiveness, and also may have the dimension of frustration or cynicism, and as a result reduced efficacy within the workplace.”

Burnout often starts to affect the balance between work and what goes on outside of work. In my case how it usually manifests is through exhaustion, and through not wanting to do anything in the evenings or at weekends, and I can generally trace it back to times when I’ve worked long hours, felt unappreciated, or have skipped lunch breaks several times in a week. It’s hard to spot sometimes, but once I do notice it I find it’s quite straightforward to come up with an action plan to get a bit of work-life balance back.

Work-life balance – how to get it back

Things I’ve found that work are:

There are some things that related to my role, but that I’d never get round to if I prioritised them purely on importance/urgency. Some of these things are really enjoyable, allow me to use different skills and work with different people, and make me feel a whole lot more positive about the rest of my work. If the rest of what I’m doing isn’t going well, or is including too much of the same kind of task, then including a few of these types of activities make the day a whole lot more bearable.

I use my morning and evening commute to draw a line between work and non-work most days each week. My commute consists of two periods of walking (20 minutes and 10 minutes) with a 20 minute train journey in between. This gives me blocks of different sort of time to listen to music, read, and think about what I need to achieve during the rest of the day (be that at home or work). I also find the physical act of walking invaluable, as it’s probably the only point of the day where I’m not sat in front of a screen of some sort.

Occasionally I need to work in the evenings. That’s not a bad thing if it will make the day ahead easier or make me feel more prepared. But if I do have to do it, then the next day I make sure I reward myself with a long lunch (ideally with company), or an hour off at a different time of the day to walk around campus and order my thoughts.

When I work from home I work at least an hour longer because I don’t have to factor in my morning commute. I therefore spend the last hour of my working day doing something that is in some way related to personal development, such as updating my achievements log, learning about something new, or opening a blank document and reflecting on how things are going, what’s blocking me, and what actions I think I need to take to get things back on track. These internal brainstorming sessions often produce insights that probably wouldn’t have come up if I’d been in the office.

Stress triggers

I know what my stress triggers are now. It’s something I was particularly interested in when I did my MBTI practitioner training, and they are pretty much exactly what my MBTI profile says they should be:

  • Being bombarded with facts and details
  • Having to adapt to changes in my usual routine, new places, different ways of behaving
  • Encountering obstacles in the outer world – traffic, equipment failures, interruptions, flight delays
  • Extraverting excessively; having to interact with individuals and groups
  • Coping with crowds. noise, confusion, chaotic environments
  • Dealing with incompetent people, illogical systems
  • Being criticised professionally, having my competence attacked, not being recognised

If I’m feeling tense or a little burned out then I’ll look at this list and see if it explains things. It usually does, and it’s a lot easier for me to rationalise the way I’m feeling. It also helps me formulate my reaction to what’s going on, as it’s possible that if I react based on how I’m feeling then I’ll over react compared to someone of a different personality type, and so I try and bear that in mind when I’m talking to other people about things that are on my mind.

MBTI theory says that the following things should help me if I’m feeling stressed:

  • Spend time alone recharging in a quiet, calm environment
  • Engage in positive Sensing activities that accomplish something useful, such as cleaning out closets, sorting photographs, fixing things
  • Take steps to lighten my schedule and sticking to my commitment to do so
  • Step back and use logic to analyse the situation
  • Get closure on some lighter, more manageable tasks
  • Remind myself that it will pass

Based on that I think I’m doing the right sorts of things to manage periods of stress. Most of what’s listed above works well for me, and is usually enough to get my equilibrium back.

Of course, different people respond to stress in different ways, but knowing what works for me has been really useful.

Experiments with PDF files

I’ve been experimenting a lot with combining PDF files in interesting ways (largely to make a recipe book from all sorts of different sources). I’ve used Preview on my Mac for a lot of this, but have also done a fair bit of work in Ubuntu recently which required a slightly different approach.

The best graphical PDF merging tool for Linux is probably pdfmod. It’s in the Ubuntu repositories, and can do anything Preview can do as far as merging/exporting PDF files from multiple sources.

For command line merging, pdftk does the job well. The syntax would be something like:

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

Which would merge all PDF files in the current directory, or:

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output combined.pdf

Which would merge two specific files.

If you need to convert Word documents to PDF prior to doing this, there is a command line tool called lowriter which is part of the libreoffice suite. The syntax would be:

lowriter --convert-to pdf *.docx

It works with .doc and .docx files.

Making professional presentations

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing a presentation that I have to give as part of my ILM5 qualification. I give presentations fairly regularly (in fact I’ve given two since I started writing this one), but this one is different in that I’m being assessed on every aspect of it, and the assessment criteria is fairly specific.

As part of this process I attended a one day workshop covering all the key aspects of presentation skills, and also giving us the opportunity to practice standing up and talking in front of other people who then provided feedback. I found this useful, and none of the feedback I received was a surprise. I think the only thing I could look to change related to delivery of presentations is the amount I move while I’m presenting, but I suspect I’m not going to be able to move less without feeling really self conscious and detracting from the quality of the presentation – I’m certainly willing to give it a try though.

We didn’t have to create slides as part of the training, but the other piece of feedback I generally get is around my slides, and specifically how they don’t contain a great deal of text and therefore often require further information to make sense to anyone who wasn’t actually at the presentation. I’ve not changed the style of my slides as result of this, but I have worked on ensuring they flow in a sensible chronological order, and I’ve also prepared a longer slide set that intersperses the slides I’ll be showing with slides containing what I’ll actually be saying. Hopefully this version of the presentation will be useful as a handout, and will add context to the slides I’ll be showing (which are largely diagrams, graphs and charts). I’m a big believer that slides should enhance a talk rather than acting as a script, and I’d much rather the audience were listening to what I say rather than reading it off a screen.

Over the years I’ve experimented with a few different ways of creating slides, although in recent years I’ve either presented from a PDF file or created them straight in Keynote (for more complex presentations). This time I ended up doing a bit of both, as I wanted to create the slides/notes as markdown files, but also wanted to take advantage of Keynote’s presentation mode. I created my slides as a markdown file, and converted them to a PDF using Pandoc and Beamer (the process is detailed here), and then I used a tool called PDF to Keynote to convert them. I prefer working in markdown because it allows me to convert the same file to a Word document, PDF, ebook and presentation, but it means I have to go through as couple of extra layers of processing to be able to present from Powerpoint. I’ve made sure I can do that this time, although it’s not usually something I’ll bother with, especially if I’m the only person presenting.

My plan is to present from my laptop in Keynote and to use my phone as a remote (or just to use the trackpad of the laptop as it’s a fairly small room). Mitigations for technical difficulties include PDF, Keynote and Powerpoint versions on a USB device and in Dropbox, a second laptop in my bag, and adaptors to allow me to connect either my phone or iPad to the projector and present from that (I had to do that once when my laptop decided to reboot just as I was about to present). I’ll also have the source markdown with me so I have the ability to create slides on the fly should I need to. A lot of this may be overkill, but I’d rather be prepared.