[yourapostasy]

In my more agile clients during the pandemic, I've seen a sharp shift to tracking time spent on those soft metrics, and acknowledging the space they take up on time per day. This led to explicit C-level support for more meeting discipline, and explicit No-Meeting-Day block-outs on calendars with the sole exception of production outages and specific meetings for specific projects with direct oversight from management 2 layers down from C-level. These clients' leadership have been very pleased with the overall productivity gain during the pandemic. The visibility into what people are working on and accomplishing, what planning captures, what planning does not capture (and importantly, who is responsible for most of the unplanned work so more planning assistance can be directed towards their areas of oversight) has pleasantly increased. A key tactic that has helped is explicitly setting aside entire planning weeks throughout the year, and making a conscious decision to trade off go-go-gains-all-the-time for more predictable delivery results so the business can plan around the deliveries.