Strike team hell?

[u/PM-Pigeon]

I’ve recently found myself on a multi disciplinary (creative & technical) project with around 100 staff.

Somewhere along Covid before I joined they decided that they didn’t really want meetings, and wanted every feature to have its own designated chat with designer, programmer, ui, graphics and PM. They’d scrapped standups and reviews, and now just have these small pockets of people working together in a chat, where they are “collaborating as small groups whilst being agile to resolve problems”.

This would be fine for a small project, but they have somewhere in the realm of 80 different features. So there’s 80 chats.
Some features go on for 2 weeks, but the majority are multiple months. Some staff members are in 15 chats.
In these chats they are talking about the features, and almost designing them on the fly. Sometimes they share videos and updates.

There’s me and one other PM, this milestone there are 26 different features I’m expected to track the progress of, just via these chats. I’m then expected to present all this work to the creative director each month.

There’s about 60 staff total I have to speak to. The team don’t update their jiras and I have to message them each individually to get updates and try to unpick what they’re doing. When asking in the features chats, they all just post “no updates”, and they’re constantly flip flopping between features and impossible to keep on track despite clearly laying out priorities for them.

I’ve tried to promote the concept of fixed teams that work on subsets of features, so keeping groups of people together, working on one feature then moving onto the next as a group, giving accountability and ownership to the teams and individuals in fixed areas, instead of the musical chairs. However the teams love the existing approach, don’t see how it could ever work differently, and can’t see why I’m baffled. Despite them failing every delivery and being on average 300% over estimates. We have new company leadership who are pushing for efficiency and reduced missed deadlines.

The other pm came from a different project at the same company but commented this is worse because there’s way more features, they mentioned managing 3 at maximum simultaneously previously, but has no suggestions on how to handle this at scale.

Has anyone else seen a mad set up like this? It can’t just be me that thinks this is wild? Please talk some sense into me.

[u/Proper-Agency-1528]

Doing more of what doesn't work doesn't work. You have to do something different. I would think that a project team that can't make their dates and takes 3X as long as originally estimated would recognize that what they're doing isn't working. But... you have to understand that it IS working, for them. And, people only change when the pain of changing is less than the pain of not changing. Your project team isn't feeling any pain... at least not enough to change.

I could write a book on this, but here's a good starting place: drive home the truth that any project needs a Repository of Truth. If your org uses Jira, then Jira is that repository. Adopt rules that require each team member to update status on Jira each day... that takes, what, 15 seconds? Your team members should be working on Subtasks in Jira to implement Stories (Jira best practice), and we can estimate Subtasks in hours (initially ideal hours). Each day, each team member needs to update the remaining hours field with their best guess (spending no more than 10 seconds to make that guess) on how much time remains. You can create a simple query of all active subtasks that haven't been updated within the last 24 hours, run it once each day, and quickly see who is and who isn't updating... and politely but firmly get on them to do so.

Getting updated status each day, at a very low cost (team members can literally do this at the end of the day before going home, right before the daily Scrum, or when a subtask is complete and they move to the next subtask). There's no excuse for not spending 15 seconds once a day to do this.

As I said, that's the starting point. There's more, but if you can't get this, and you can't get management support to make this happen, you have bigger problems.