Best way to bring agility/improve delivery of multi-tasking teams

Hi Wade,

That sounds good theoretically but practically you cannot put customers on hold and tell them that we take one project at a time. For any customer-facing organziation, it is very usual to work on multiple projects at a time and context switching is a reality that you cannot escape from. Companies need to secure business and once secured, the client needs to see some traction/progress on his project. So I agree with you in theoretical terms but practically that does not solve my problem. Your take, please?

Hi Kiron,

Great suggestion, indeed we need to increase customer value, but the question is how? Any practical suggestions, please?

Thank you Sergio for your great and knowledgeable piece of advice, For me, agile is simply being responsive to client/project changing requirements and continue prioritizing items that deliver the most value to the customer.

Thank you Matto for your great tips.

Thank you Pang for your valuable feedback.

Thank you Peter.

Thank you Girija for your feedback. We can raise 100 questions about why the organization is working in this manner but that will not produce any concrete improvements. Big or very small, I am more interested in some practical steps that can yield some improvement here.

Zaheer,

You're right about theory vs practice, but I would try to move towards the "theory" as much as possible. You might have 3 customers that want to see progress on their projects, but if you can get your teams to stop multi-tasking and finish one project at a time, the final deliverable dates will not change. In fact, 2 of your projects will finish much sooner, and even your last project will probably finish earlier than promised.

This may come down managing stakeholder expectations. Perhaps it's too late to fix these 3 projects, but perhaps your organization could improve this going forward.

This is assuming your projects can be done sequentially without significant gaps in work. If you have dependencies between the projects, or if there are gaps in the work where your team is waiting, then they might have to switch between projects.

I don't know the specifics of your projects or organization, of course, but generally speaking, teams will perform faster if they can focus on one project at a time, and you will deliver faster to your customers.

I'd suggest following Goldratt's theory of constraints. A customer might initially complain that it will take a few weeks to get to them, but most customers will be much happier if the team is focused once their work begins rather than trying to multitask across multiple engagements.

Kiron