Can you believe another year has gone by and we’re heading into 2023 already!
I’m showing my age when I say I can remember partying to bring in the new century. Let’s hope this year is a good one for us all, and fingers crossed for a bit of respite from the constant up and downs of the business environment that we’ve seen of late.
With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about resolutions – the beginnings of new habits. Or at least, habits I used to have that haven’t really been my focus in recent times.
It’s the time of year when individuals start to think about what is important and how they can live their best life and all that – so why can’t teams do the same? You could have a conversation with your colleagues about what new habits they want to develop or reinforce during the year.
The infographic below shows the things I’ve been thinking of for my projects. If you are going to come up with a list of team resolutions, then it should be something you co-create – don’t just print off this list and tell them that’s what their goals are!
Use a team meeting to talk about what is important for the organization and for their professional development, and then pin the list up somewhere where everyone can see it.
Time tracking
We will track time on our priority projects and use the data to improve estimates.
Estimating
We will test new estimating techniques instead of always relying on professional judgement.
Options we’ll look at include Rough Order of Magnitude and parametric estimating.
Lessons learned
We will run regular lessons learned identification sessions and turn those into actions for improvements.
We’ll have a clear agenda for lessons learned meetings and invite the right people to contribute.
Meeting minutes
We will commit to getting meeting minutes out within 24 hours.
In fact, we might even go further than that and use automation tools like Otter to make it faster and easier to document what was agreed in meetings.
Work/life balance
We will take active steps to create a culture where balance is the norm.
In fact, we’ll move towards work/life integration, where we can seamlessly manage work and life together. Because kids in MS Teams calls is the new normal!
Internal networking
We will make an effort to meet other teams in the organization to share what we do and learn from them.
Professional networking is important so we’ll invite other teams to our team huddles so they can present what they do, and we’ll return the favor.
