Ben Barden

Products - Projects - Process

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Productivity

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How many projects should a team work on at a time?

I recently posted on LinkedIn, asking for suggestions for post ideas. This one comes from James Nowell:

I would love to know what your thoughts are around the maximum number of projects a team should be working on at any point in time. The ideal number is one for pure focus time however I don’t see that as realistic in an agile, fast changing world. What do you think is optimal?

In my view, it’s not so much about a specific number, but about how your pipeline of work is managed. However, I’ll come back to numbers a bit later on.

Your first goal should be to make sure there’s a logical and consistent entry point to the team – a manager or a triager – so that new work requests are given some kind of assessment. Teams can work on many things at once – but as time is precious and you probably have a backlog you’ll never reach the end of, it’s essential to prioritise.

Without checks on new work coming into the team, a team can quickly become overwhelmed. It’s easy to say “yes” to every request. It’s easy to get distracted by the latest shiny thing – whether it’s a cool technical tool, or simply a bloody good idea from one of your stakeholders. But if you try to accommodate every request, or you keep getting distracted by new things, the output of the team will grind to a halt.

The “entry point” person – let’s call them the triager – is essentially a first line of defence, to protect the team from interruptions – as it will take longer to complete a task if you keep context-switching than if you do the task from start to finish.

The triager can also be the face of the team and give requestors a consistent message about what work can be taken on. It’s fine to say no to things. It’s also fine to say yes, but not until projects A, B and C are done. And it’s important to watch out for the type of work that should jump the queue – where there’s a big benefit to the business, where there’s some kind of legal deadline you need to meet, or where there’s a project you can work on to unblock some other work.

It’s also really vital for the triager to have a good relationship with the team, which means not accepting every request and telling the team they just need to do it. The triager should either know enough about the work the team is doing, or be able to learn about it, so that they are doing more than passing information back and forth. Being able to answer questions about whether something is practical can be useful too. But it’s not essential for all teams. The triager role works best if they can collaborate with the team to find out how they can be helpful and useful, and not simply add an extra layer of bureaucracy to the process.

OK, so that’s quite a bit about prioritising. The next thing to look at is how to organise the work you do want to do, and spread it around the team. The target number of “how many projects should we work on” has a cop-out answer here – “it depends” – but it really does. For each project, or block of related tasks, you should consider the following:

  1. Is it important for everyone to understand the work that’s being done? For projects that will deliver something that becomes central to a lot of your future work, you may want to get everyone working on the project – or at least set some time aside to talk through what’s happening, whether that’s before/during/after the work is done.
  2. How many people have the expertise to do the work? If one person is an expert, you’re definitely going to need them involved. It could be worthwhile to share their knowledge around. But if you have, say, 6 people in the team and only 1 has the knowledge to do most of the work on a project, it might be better to get 1 or 2 other people to learn alongside the expert, and have the other 3 people working on other things in parallel. They can always pick up the skills later.
  3. Is there enough work to share across the whole team? If you have a big team and not a lot of distinct work on a single project, you might not want to have the whole team working on one thing. However, you could pair people up, especially if points 1 or 2 apply.
  4. Is it possible, or practical, to do the work in parallel? You might not want to put 5 people on separate tasks if they need to be done in sequence.

There’s plenty to bear in mind with this.

So, what’s the maximum number of projects you can – or should – work on at a time?

In theory, the maximum number of tasks you can work on at a time is equal to the number of people in the team. But if each task is for a totally different project, that’s not really teamwork – you’ve just got a group of people each with their own tasks.

It can be really valuable for a team to “swarm” around a common goal, rather than having each person working on something totally different. It aids collaboration between team members. And I’d argue it’s better to have one thing “done” than 5 things in progress. You can read more about this in my post: Getting things done.

In 2021, I’m trying to write more regularly on my blog – hopefully one post per week. See my progress so far here: Weekly blogging in 2021

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Getting things done

One of the first things I learned in Scrum is the importance of a task being “Done”. In short, until something is done, you don’t get the value.

Getting a task to “Done” might not be as simple as someone picking it up and doing it. Sometimes, it’s good for members of a team to pair up and work on a task together.

Developers might have enough knowledge of the task and the system they’re working with to code it on their own — but they’re going to need someone else to review it.

Unfortunately, what I’ve seen happen all too often is that there isn’t any slack in the team. The mindset seems to be that if we have 5 or 6 developers, we can give them 5 or 6 totally distinct tasks. What do you do if a developer needs to ask someone for help? Or if their code is ready for review, but everyone is busy on other things?

By focusing on too many things at once, and treating everyone as a “resource” that can have 100% of their time assigned to a different task to the rest of the team, what happens is you end up with a lot of things that are partway done.

Instead of having as many balls in the air as you have people, it’s better to get the team to focus on a smaller number of tasks and see them through to completion. That way, you will be steadily delivering things, instead of running into the issue where it seems that nothing is coming out of the team — until suddenly, a bunch of things all land at the same time.

Are you always busy?

This approach can also benefit anyone who keeps talking about how busy they are. Being too busy should not be seen as a trophy — it can mean you’re overloaded and stressed out.

If a task is on your to-do list for too long, and more tasks are being added to your list all the time, you can quickly feel overburdened.

To avoid this, try to limit the number of things you have in progress at any one time. You can do this by focusing on getting things done.

It can be very rewarding to finish a task. It doesn’t mean you can’t add to something in future — it just means you’re marking the task as complete. Make sure each task has a clear goal, so you know what “done” looks like.

By focusing on getting things done, you can start working through your backlog, stop feeling so busy, and finish more things!

Further reading: https://www.inc.com/wanda-thibodeaux/the-real-reason-unfinished-jobs-stress-you-out-according-to-psychology.html

In 2021, I’m trying to write more regularly on my blog – hopefully one post per week. See my progress so far here: Weekly blogging in 2021

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How recurring calendar reminders help me to get things done

I often think of things I’d like to do more consistently.

Reading. Writing. Coding. Making music.

All things I do from time to time, but I tend to do a lot of them in bursts – and then not again for a while.

Throw in gaming and watching TV shows – mostly on Netflix – and I have plenty of distractions to keep me from doing the things I want to be doing… or feel I should be doing.

I’ve heard about doing something until it becomes a habit. But you know what? I’ve often heard that approach without much to explain HOW to make something a habit – beyond “do it more”.

Sure, find what works for you. But what if nothing works? Or if you often feel unmotivated?

Recurring calendar reminders to the rescue!

I have recurring reminders in my work calendar – and some for personal projects in my personal calendar. One of my personal reminders is for the Review highlights post I write every week for Switch Scores. Following my first blog post of 2021, I created another reminder to write a weekly blog post. It’s a recurring reminder with no end date. This will then prompt me to write a post every week.

I use my calendar a lot. It allows me to see what’s coming up, when I have free time and when I don’t.

But calendars aren’t just for meetings. They work for tasks, too. There’s a reason why lots of productivity tools boast “Google calendar integration”! So why not go directly to your calendar?

You can use more sophisticated tools if you like. I find that Google Calendar helps me to stick to a schedule, because my phone alerts me when an event or a reminder is coming up. You can also post your reminders in a personal calendar, rather than mixing them in with your work calendar. Or you could even create a dedicated blogging calendar.

One blog post per week isn’t a lot. But it’s a start. Without the recurring reminder, I wouldn’t remember to write – or I wouldn’t bother.

It’s not rocket science – but this is a tip I’ve found to be extremely beneficial over the last couple of years.

Bonus tip: Don’t post too quickly

At the start of this post, I said I do things in bursts.

After writing my first blog post, I thought up the idea for my second post. So I continued writing and got the second post done too – but held back on publishing it as soon as I finished writing it.

In the past, I would’ve immediately put it online. But if I’m aiming to write one post per week, that doesn’t just mean pushing myself to write. It also means holding back and not putting up the next post as soon as I write it.

Sometimes, the excitement of finishing a new blog post gets the better of me, and I share it immediately. But unlike catching up on Twitter posts, blog posts take longer to read, and can take longer to digest. Posting too quickly can be overwhelming, and result in a post not getting the time of day it perhaps deserves.

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Productivity tip: keep a Done list

If you’re anything like me, you probably have a bunch of to-do lists for all the things you do:

  • blog post ideas and activities
  • project to-do lists – writing content, coding, marketing
  • household tasks – maybe a cleaning rota?
  • financial and other personal affairs

It can feel overwhelming to have so many things to do – and this can lead to chronic procrastination.

I’ll look at to-do lists in future posts, but for now the tip for today is: try keeping a “Done” list.

How it works: Whenever you complete a task, you’ll tick it off your To-do list. You might already have a way to see these completed tasks. But a lot of task-based apps and tools tend to veer towards the “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy. So once you tick an item off the list, you’ve done it – excellent. But it also vanishes.

So, why not start a list of the items you’ve completed? Depending on the type of tasks you’re doing and how often you’re ticking things off, this could be a weekly or a monthly completed task list.

Today I’ve done lots of household tasks, and feel quite accomplished. But when I move onto the next thing, I will probably forget about what I did today. I find it very motivating to look back over things I’ve done.

Let me know if you start keeping a Done list and how you get on with it. Thanks for reading!