Problem

Amid team members’ leaving, and increased workload due to new project initiatives, the product development team at Ahtar Oo had been struggling with productivity drop and increased stress, largely due to existing processes and practices around task management, issue tracking, and communication for 2+ years.

Confusion over individual accountabilities, work priorities, issue resolution and customer complaints was predominant among some team members.

As a result, the effects were apparent during standup meetings, which were taking 45-55 mins on average for a team of 6 members.

Background

In Q2 2020, I took on the role of leading the in-house development team. Originally, there were 11 members, and I succeeded a senior lead who had established most of existing processes and practices, with the members who left.

Management had suggested, on several occasions, the team to reflect on the status quo and devise a proposal for improvements. One key duty for the first few months in my new role was to take on this issue.

Evaluation of the case

My observations identified the following to be the key contributors to the problem:

1. No holistic and long-term aiming SOPs had been fully documented and properly implemented.

2. Management had always been cost-sensitive about process improvement, and insisted on sticking to only free, open-source software for internal use, and…

3. No unified communication channel.

4. The team had rarely experimented with alternative practices and tools.

My Role

As the new project lead, I worked closely with Management and the team to solve the issues, and below is an overview of how I worked:

Understand the status quo and ongoing challenges