| I think that there is a tragedy-of-the-commons issue here that some teams or organizations just aren't very good at tackling. Everyone's time is a valuable resource. It's quick and easy to demand synced communication, but that depletes the time people can dedicate to longer tasks that should not be interrupted. Now take the team's collective time. That's the commons, and poor work discipline drains that shared resource. It takes discipline to write procedures, policies, boring documentation, or to make sure that the authoritative source of truth for your project still reflects reality. Those 3 days of back and forth emails, or the 15 minute working session, may need to exist for some situations. However I've found that people can work to reduce those 3 days to several hours as long as the answers to some questions are available in up to date documentation. I have a couple of team members right now who don't want to write certain documentation, or don't feel they need to edit existing documentation to improve its legibility. The most often heard excuse has been "it only takes me 15 minutes on a call to do the task". Which may seem fine from that perspective. That person doesn't realize that they've spent multiple days worth of hours spending 15 minutes on something when if they had spent 2 hours writing the documentation, they'd be saving precious time and priceless context switching. (I'm a new team lead. I'm enjoying it greatly, and find these sorts of inefficiencies both fascinating and revolting) |
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