Half of my team’s work is planned, but they also receive many additional unplanned requests (emails) that are critical to the company. It is hard for them to determine priority because every requester claims their request is the top priority and with so many emails it is easy to lose track of what to do.
To make things worse, one of our team members recently moved to a different department and the rest of the team had to temporarily pick up the slack while a new employee was brought on board. This has overwhelmed the team and I am worried I will burn them out.
Coincidentally I just read Cal Newport’s book A World Without Email. This book took many of the concepts that I had implemented for myself over the years and helped me to coalesce them into a system that can be applied to teams. I am now building a Calm Critical Work process for my team with this information.
One of the first processes I am implementing is a ticketing system and kanban board. The benefits are that all requests are captured outside of email and the priority of those requests is visible to everyone reducing the need to follow up with the requestee or escalate to me. We are using a software called Jira that also allows threaded conversations within a ticket. This cuts down on many emails by removing the CC’ing and splitting of email threads.
Just a note, I was listening to Cal Newport’s podcast, and someone sent in a question where they stated they cannot do this because their organization limits the software available. I thought this was a cop-out. If I didn’t have access to Jira I would have implemented this in a spreadsheet. It would not be as nice as Jira but it would work. Also, all organizations have a process to bring in new software you just have to figure out what it is.
In my organization, there are always “hot” items. I hate these because it seems everything is a hot item. Because of this, I am defining a priority system by the due date and I am creating an option for high-priority items that would have a significant impact on the whole organization such as shutting down a department and low-priority items that are not critical to the organization’s goals (those tasks that someone decides is a “good idea”). If someone wants to raise the priority of their request they need to justify to me why it is more important than everything else ahead of it.
Secondary benefits include data to justify more employees, the ability to balance workload (one of my employees gets more requests than others because gets shit done), and identifying standard processes that need to be developed/improved.
Some of this is the software tool but some of this is also behavior. We will need to train ourselves and others to use this process. In addition, we need to implement changes such as limits to Work in Progress (WIP, or the things you are currently working on) so my team is not trying to work on too many things at once.
Maybe you can consider some of these ideas if your team is being overwhelmed.