Department Health Work Queues
Checking in with some business analyzing from my business analysis days.
in the interest of healthier departments
Do other departments know what you are responsible for, so that they are not duplicating work, or working around you? Hint: They cannot know if you, a member of the team, do not know.
This work, making sure other departments know what you are doing and how they can interact with you, is admin work. It is facilitation admin, greasing the wheels admin, foundational to a functional business unit admin. It must also be completed by someone with the correct level of authority and responsibility to enforce behavior (read: not process that’s doomed to be overridden by a direct manager at the first, second, or third chance).
It is harder on everyone when this type of facilitation admin does not happen. It feels like uncertainty for other departments: like unknown ownership of a task, unknown responsibilities of a shared task. These unknowns are all extra hurdles that must be overcome. This situation is visible too, it looks like duplicate work, or important work not getting done at all.
The good news is that this is a solvable problem.
the fringes
Input/output queues are too rigid. Phrases like ‘building empires’ and ‘monopolies’ describe departments whose motivations have strayed into territories where it is hard to get any productive work out of them if you’re not an insider, if you don’t have a personal arrangement. When back-channels are the only channel. The goal of these types of departments is maintaining status quo*, and the work input is guarded heavily, work output is not transparent, and inquiries to how this department is contributing to the company are unwelcome. This is an anchor, a tremendous weight on the company ship, preventing forward motion.
Input/output queues are too flexible. The complete opposite of a free market approach, then, is an entirely open and responsive work queue, where anyone can submit work at any time with an expectation those tasks will get done promptly. This is serving the customers and business at the cost of moving the department’s own goals forward, ultimately so that it can provide structure and expertise needed to make higher quality deliverables. There should not be any department in the organization that completely relies on others to fill its work queue. These are sails on the company ship, changing at a whim, dependent on the wind to move in a forward motion.
what good looks and feels like
Good input/output queues are intentionally easy to view and use by both the internal department members and external teams. This transparency removes the weight and the burden of the anchor/too rigid process. A significant percentage of the active queue is allocated to external team requests, where an also non-trivial percentage is reserved for internal department tasks to move the company forward and provide higher quality deliverables to other teams. With this balance we can help point and push the company ship forward.
The input/output queue is so important to department health because it is the foundation that teams use to build their working days. Without it, it’s too easy for email, meetings, and calls to take precedence over tasks from the queue. Generally ‘email’ is not the work, the work is the work, and a salary isn’t getting paid for someone to answer email–it is, in fact, to tend to and deliver work from the queue.
A functional input/output output queue needs to: a) exist in a way that everyone on the team knows what it is, where to find it, and can view/contribute to it at any time b) be actively pruned c) contain tasks that serve the department’s long term goals as well as other departments needs
Healthy department queues
Shine a light on how work is getting done today.
Go getem
Questions for your team meeting: Do you know how work flows from other departments to yours? How does work flow from your department to others? Do you track it more than just a direct message or an email? What is our team’s throughput for the current quarter, for last quarter? What are our long term projects, and are we making progress? How accessible are we to other teams that need direct deliverables or stakeholders?
KPIs for your team meeting slide: Throughput - are things getting done Progress on Long Term Projects - are the right things getting done (savings/investment) Helping other teams - are the right things getting done, what is the ‘urgent’ process (cash flow)
The team meeting each week is a critical part of maintaining forward momentum: it’s a wonderful time to check in, learn new information, and share progress…all so that everyone has a smooth week ahead.
Free market link Link: https://archive.is/jzeCn
*An article about a company that runs their input/output entirely on an internal currency, simulating a free market, demonstrates how far gone structures, processes can get when reduced down to pure currency driving the work getting done. Outsized individual power rules these departments at the detriment of serving the customers and the business.