Best team configuration for top performance and well-being

You began your day with 3 tasks on your to-do list. You ended it with 6, and you feel exhausted.
Or it took you 6 MD to deliver an activity you had estimated in 4.
Or maybe you have that process improvement idea you could never implement because it was not urgent and you couldn't find the time.

Your team members are as familiar with these situations as you are.

However, you may be wondering why they aren't delivering on time.

Usually, the problem comes from multitasking in different flavors:

• Interruptions
• Priority changes
• Difficulty focusing for a long time on an activity.

In my experience, my teams benefited from dividing the types of activity among the team members.

Types of Activities

Not every activity is the same. They vary mainly in complexity, length, and urgency. The following categories are named according to an IT Support team, but feel free to identify them in your niche and to share them with me.

Incidents

Unplanned activities, short duration, high priority, and low complexity. Fundamental for maintaining a good product or service and for your Team to transmit a good image.

Some examples are:

• Issue found in the system
• Executing small activities on demand.
• Answering questions and giving support to other teams
• Monitoring processes or executing recurrent activities

Requests

Planned and estimated activities. Mid or long duration. Mid or high priority and complexity. They are the core activities that your Team performs and the ones that provide more value to the company:

• New functionalities or enhancements to the system
• Working on products or services that your Team delivers
• Analysis and estimation of new functionalities.

Problems

Activities with low priority and high complexity. They are not mandatory for the correct operation of your Team, but if done, they will improve your Team's performance. They are usually internal and not directly billable, which reduces their priority:

• Root cause analysis for recurrent incidents
• Process or performance improvements
• Investigations and proofs of concepts

Team Organization

In most teams, every team member does every type of activity. The division relies on topics, clients, or products/services.

So, if I'm good at a specific topic, I work on requests, incidents, and problems related to that topic.

With every team member doing the same types of activities, they will follow the same prioritization:

1. Incidents
2. Requests
3. Problems

Consequences

• The incidents work as interruptions for the requests and problems. They also include an unpredictable component in the request estimations and threaten their deadlines. Missing deadlines leads to overtime, frustration, and loss of confidence.
• It makes it difficult to focus on complex activities for extended periods because the team members have many things on their plates.
• Capacity can't be controlled; at some point, every member can be working on any activity.
• Process issues and bottlenecks hide in the confusion.
• Problems are never attacked. No one complains about them, and you leave them for "when you have time."

The solution for this is to subdivide the Team based on types of activities.

Team subdivision

By removing the incidents from the planned work, you can limit them to the defined capacity and save the planned work from the incidents intromission.

Create 3 buckets (one per type of activity) and define their capacity. The percentages will be based on the contract and volume. These numbers can change over time.

Interactions between the 3 flows are not only required but highly positive. The Team will decide on the best way to interact.

People in the subteams should rotate. Some key players will spend more time in certain activities than others, but you should balance performance and professional growth.

Benefits

This division allows your Team to work at different levels of concentration and dedicate the appropriate amount of time to each activity. Let's dig in:

• People working on requests are not interrupted by other topics. They can keep their focus on the activity and meet the deadlines. The delivery will be faster and of higher quality.
• Those who work on incidents will have more agility to move between different topics and give faster responses. They are the fast lane of the Team. Multitasking is always tricky, but being superficial/short topics makes it easier.
• The problems are solved. They have dedicated people acting on them.
• The team members gain experience in different actuation areas, not only in specific topics.
• Team collaboration and internal support are simpler than interacting with multiple external clients.

Takeaway

The main points covered in this article are:

• Multitasking and interruptions are enemies of quality and well-being.
• Subdividing the Team to attack the different types of activities will potentialize the individual qualities and the Team's capacity.
• You can change the setup as the flow of activities changes.

That's all for today. I hope this helps you. See you next time.