6 months into our new way of working - what has changed?
Setting the scene
Just over six months ago, we started on a journey of re-discovering how our organisation works.
While our previous operating system (OS) wasn’t broken, we thought we could do better—better in terms of our ability to use our collective strengths to deliver more value for our client partners, and in creating a more human and rewarding environment place for our team to come to spend each day in.
We took inspiration from books and blogs that showcased both established and emerging organisations around the world taking steps to re-design their operating systems and become even better.
One of the key sources we were guided by is a book titled Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan, which challenges you to think about ‘what’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life? It’s inspiring, funny and practical and well worth a read for anyone looking to change how they, their team or their organisation works.
So here is a blog post about a few of the changes we’ve made that we believe have had a big impact on how we do what we do.
The standard disclaimer with organisational change applies here too—by no means are we saying we are great, we are just starting out and have lots to learn, and some of the change has been difficult to stick to.
The first five changes to our OS
1. Teams rule
The saying goes ‘many hands make light work’, but in our world it’s really ‘many heads make the best work’.
Whether it be defining a problem, making sense of data, thinking and planning what a client should do next, or designing how a slide deck can have the most impact, the type of work we do is made better by using the collective knowledge and experience of our team.
We strive to team up around each project we deliver. Teaming up has a multiplier effect on the work quality and also helps to avoid any single point of failure. We have defined roles and working agreements in our project teams that outline our expectations of our other team members.
2. Limiting work in progress
Our KanBan board, which helps us to plan our workflow and limit work in progress!
Lots of evidence now supports the fact that multi-tasking is a myth. Stretching yourself or your team over multiple intellectual tasks at one time is only going to reduce the quality and output of your work and bring on stress and inertia.
Limiting work in progress or WIP means keeping focused on a single task until it’s done. This optimises the bandwidth of the team, leads to better quality work and helps team members experience the satisfaction that comes with accomplishment.
Our work typically involves numerous projects happening at any one time, which can make it a challenge for our team to prioritise what needs working on, by whom, by when.
While we’ve always had an online project management platform that outlines how our work is to be delivered, we introduced a Kanban board where our team meets at least once a week to plan and prioritise our work for the upcoming period.
Together with these planning meetings, the novelty of having a physical board that is visible in our office with simple columns of ‘to do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’, has helped us get organised, stay focused on getting things into the ‘done’ pile and limit WIP.
Our KanBan board, which helps us to plan our workflow and limit work in progress!
3. Working in sprints
Flowing on from limiting WIP is the concept of working in sprints. Anyone familiar with the emergence of Agile will recognise that sprints are essentially time-defined and usually intensive blocks of work activity that are focused on producing something.
We’ve adopted the concept of sprints right back to how we plan out a project upfront. We lay out an entire project in several sprints of work by our team, with each one followed by a ‘product’ that gets turned over to a client as either a gated checkpoint to proceed or a key deliverable.
There’s plenty more to unpack about how sprints lend themselves to the various tasks that we do in the world of consulting. But overall, the focused effort on producing something that is valuable and meaningful for our client at the end of a defined chunk of time has helped us stay locked in to what is really needed to push any project towards that client’s desired outcome.
4. Retros
After a big push of work, we’ve started to hold retrospectives or retros as a way for us to step back, reflect and learn.
Retros are a type of meeting that involves the relevant people involved in the work and is all about being curious about how we did the work. Within an open forum with space for all members to share, we pose questions around things like ‘what worked well?’, ‘what did we find hard?’ and ‘how would we do this again next time?’.
As retros become more of a normal part of our rhythm, we’re looking at ways to document the outcomes of a retro and make sure that this information feeds into the planning process next time we do something similar.
5. Working in public
This last one is probably where we found the quickest success—working in public. This refers to taking the default approach of making information transparent and available for anyone who might need it.
We now do (almost) all of our computer-based work using Google Docs/Slides, which allows our team to work together at the same time in the same (virtual) place and has removed any need for individual files stored locally and only accessible to one person in the team.
Similarly, we’ve joined the many organisations who use instant messaging platforms like Slack to kill off internal email. This has helped us keep conversations in the open and searchable for when someone needs the information, rather than in emails between only those who the sender thinks needs that information at that time.
What impact have these changes had?
Our approach to changing our OS has been iterative and gradual, as we find out what works and what doesn’t for our unique needs and as we continue to prioritise ‘the work’. However, the early results from the changes we’ve made has been pleasing and has helped the quality and output of our work go up another few gears.
We’ve managed to remove some of the bottlenecks and frustrations that our team experienced, and started shifting to an organisation that places the experience and performance of the team in front of the rules and levels that often come with growing organisations.
And it hasn’t all been easy. There’s been times where we have snapped back to our past ways of working just to get something done. But we feel we are mostly headed in the right direction.
Where to next for our organisational OS?
We definitely see our organisational OS as needing to continually evolve as we grow and learn. We need to continue to work to bed down and refine some of the early changes we’ve made, but there’s a handful of other changes that we are eyeing off over the first half of 2020 such as:
Developing a team charter to agree on what’s important to us
Optimising our workflow
Clearing up which decisions can be made right away and where advice might be needed
Creating default (but not standardised) approaches to how we do our work
Improving how we come together and meet as a team
Creating space to work on the things that are rewarding and develop our skills
Agreeing on the few most meaningful metrics to measure our performance
As I mentioned at the top, we’re not out to try and fix any problems. We’re just really excited about the idea that we can create an organisation that does good things, can grow and can create positive experiences for both our staff and our clients.
If you’re either thinking about or on the journey to making your own organisation a more human and effective place to work, we’d love to hear your insights and would be happy to share more of our experience—so please reach out via email or LinkedIn using the links below.