Avoid Starting Unnecessary Projects

I have had an interesting conversation with my friend who is also a manager in one of the Polish companies. At a certain moment, he said:

You know, what I have been doing recently was mostly convincing business not to start a particular project or to start it later. It took me a lot of time.

He saw it as a loss of time.

“That’s great,” I said. “I think it’s one of the most important things any leader should do, especially when working in a high-pressure environment. As Steve Jobs once said: the most important tool to improve programmers’ productivity is reducing the number of features they have to implement.”

The Common Misstep in Software Teams

It’s the most common issue software teams have to deal with. It’s quite frequent that a few projects are run simultaneously, and then another one is added to the stream. All Kanban and Lean practitioners will tell you it is a waste. And it really is. Don’t you believe it? Try Kniberg’s Multitasking Name Game. Play it with your business and then discuss what you can learn from it.

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)