Managing chaos

 

Do you remember when  you find yourself in the depth of chaos at work last time? It could be when you just jumped into the ongoing project, which was previously led by another manager or when disaster-like events happened. Do you remember this feeling of disorder, anxiety and stress? I guess that is the worst part of our profession. So here I want you to meet my list of hints on how not to get bogged down but keep moving forward.

1. Seek and destroy real blockers

The first thing we should check is what should be done but isn't. It is not only where the progress stopped, it is also what this stop affects. When defining blockers check if they are real. Not every stop may be caused by problems you cannot resolve on your own: for instance, if you can avoid interrupting the development process using rearrangements of works, it is not a blocker. Even if you found a truly creative or complicated solution for the situation it means it wasn’t a real blocker.
So you got your blockers. Let’s not pretend that almost always they can be resolved through escalating. Prepare a detailed description of situation, risks and proposal for variety of scenarios and be ready to roll according to the upper-level management decisions.

2. Check understanding

Knowing what to do is nearly 80% of success. If you want to get something you will get something, but the first something could be vastly different from the second one. Every moment of being in a manager role should be full of thorough understanding of what to do. Spread your understanding of what to do, of what your goal is onto every team member. Make sure that everyone gets the gist of your messages every time and don’t be shy to correct somebody when hearing distorted insights.

3. Set milestones

Life is cruel to upfront predictions: plans against reality is almost always like the first piglet’s house of straw against wolf's blowing. However reality is even more harsh. While building a good-quality bricked plan you have a great chance to be devoured by a wolf as he won’t wait until it is done. The last chance for a piglet is to run away. What I propose to do is to set milestones on the escape roadmap.
Three tips for this point

• Mind all the known risks while setting milestones. 
• Set responsible for every milestone. 
• Remember about the phenomenon of planning fallacy.

4. Control carefully

Checking how things are going is the most art-like manager skill. It doesn’t matter who you are: the X-model or the Y-model manager. The very first thing you should do is to define the progress controlling process for everyone you want control and to reach the agreement about it. It is just one of the rules of the game helping not only to make it clear but to avoid creating an additional emotional pressure or distracting colleagues. What should be defined here is up to the situation but commonly they are the interval (daily,weekly, monthly) and the format (from a structured report to a freeform spoken reply).

5. Stay neutral-positive

State of mind might be a decisive aspect of whatever you do. In spite of you might think of it is neither about positive thinking nor only about you. What I want to say here is the baseline of your vision should be about creating an atmosphere of reasonable confidence in the result achievability. Bad things can happen for sure, but they should not make you or any team member unstable. Be steady and radiate positive confidence.

6. Be ready to jump into pool of details to the depth of decision-making

Some managers think that technical details are only for experts. Typical misconception. Of course experts must be the most skilled and experienced team members in a specific area. Still managers as minimum should have a basic knowledge in a certain area of projects they manage and be well informed for making reasonable and safety decisions. Don’t be afraid to get into the technical details.
 
Instead of conclusion 

My path of managing began from the chaos and I acted like a headless chicken in the beginning. Next decade was about becoming more consistent and confident through collecting my chaos antidote checklist. Some cases can still take me by surprise. Yet deeply inside I feel that this list will help me in the next decade but it is going to be extended. Stay tuned and in 10 years you will get a brand-new post with next six tips.