How to avoid bureaucracy and create processes that will actually help your team.
Listen to the team
You can run a retrospective to understand what isn’t working in your current process. A common manager mistake at this stage is assuming you understand the whole picture and coming up with a complete redesign of the team’s ways of working without talking to them. Don’t be that manager. Be curious. Assume that there are things you don’t know about.
Ideally, your contributions during the retrospective will all be in the form of questions. Let your team do the talking even if you need to deal with awkward silences.
Co-create a definition of good
This isn’t the new process yet. It is a set of characteristics a good new process should have.
A common manager mistake at this stage is getting the information from the retrospective, going into a cave, and coming back with a fully formed new process that the team has to adapt. While this can work, you’ll be making your life unnecessarily harder.
Create the new process with your team. You’ll come up with better ideas, and it will be much easier for the team to adopt something they helped create.
List the problems in your current process
Now that you have information about what isn’t working and a definition of good, you can make comparisons and list concrete problems you could fix.
Be careful not to fix symptoms of problems. Make an effort to understand the root causes of each problem you list. If you fix the symptom, you’ll make it less painful but the problem will remain. Simple tools like the Five whys can help you identify root causes.
List solutions and run experiments
List possible solutions to the problems. Most of the time, there will be multiple possible solutions to each problem. If you can only see one solution, try getting to at least a couple more.
It will not always be clear which solution is the best. Even if it is clear, you may be wrong or there may be some constraint you didn’t account for. So, run experiments. Test your favorite solution for a week or two, check if it solved the problem and is in line with your definition of good. If it didn’t solve the problem, try another solution. If it did solve the problem, move on to the next problem on your list.
Conclusion
There is no magic trick. Listen carefully to your team, work with them, define what good looks like, and run experiments. There is a good chance you’ll end up with a process that works great for your team.
This article shares practical tips to tackle specific problems uncovered on a health check.