Underestimated impact of iterations.
Back and forth iterations of tasks is a common issue and causes wasted time and team energy that can be mitigated by setting employee goals. In a hurry to start or to complete certain task as quickly as possible, team members miss to complete in full certain actions, or to provide necessarily handover details to customers or their teammates. In the desire to save a few minutes, hours are lost in back-and-forth clarifications, distraction from switching from one task to another and even restarting work from scratch.
What is the cause?
There are situations that occasionally occur, no matter how strict company process is. Few of them are listed below:
- Handover a task without executing necessarily testing and impact assessment.
- Reporting an issue without enough details like context, reproduce pattern and expectation.
- Starting a task with incomplete requirements and so taking risk of making wrong assumption.
- Starting task with uncertainty and without agreement with stakeholders on the final solution.
What is the reason?
There are variety of possible reasons including: conscious decisions for making exceptions as justification of emergencies; distraction from side activities; misleading judgements based on previous experience; too much trust in the others’ domain knowledge or expertise. But most common is the belief that the task is good enough to be transitioned, and additional details can be omitted with the assumption that others will have the ability to see the same picture through our eyes.
Collecting KPIs data
Tracking metrics like iterations on each stage of the process, like “Reopen iterations”, “Development iterations”, “Review iterations”, “Testing iterations”, can be easily done in Jira with a few customizations of workflows and Performance Objectives add-on. Follow these 3 min JIRA configuration steps and see how to start collecting more data from your business processes, that can be analyzed later and be used to enrich the set of the company KPIs.
Setting goals
Increasing team’s awareness of wasted time in iterations is important. The introduction of KPIs will be well accepted by the team when they realize the positives of the time saved, which can be more meaningfully invested for them and the company. The quarterly goals based on iterations will add another aspect of the evaluation to your performance review process.
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