[cynicalpeace]

These are some nice updates.

However, it made me think of how much time and money is spent just on organizing things, even when organizing something doesn’t make things go better.

In fact, the best teams I’ve worked on have a bias against organizing and a “just do it now” mentality. It depends on the specific case of course. But as a culture, software engineers have a bias towards organizing too much as opposed to not enough.

[throwaway918299]

This is why a board with sticky notes "TODO - In Progress - Done", is still the way to go for most projects. Easy to manage and you don't need to "groom the backlog" or any of that nonsense. If it's important, it goes on the board. When a bunch of things get done, the notes just go in the trash and you move on to the next thing. If there's too many notes, toss some in the trash and forget about it (if it ends up being important, it's really easy to just write a new note).

[bluGill]

The only downside to that is if you have remote team members they can't do anything to the board.

[cynicalpeace]

Yup, or even simpler- just a checklist in a file.

[atomicnature]

Amen to that. Over-organization is often a sign of high turnover in teams.

If you can retain engineers long-term, then the amount of repetitive paperwork/reports/status updates, etc reduce significantly.

You can have low frequency, low effort yet high bandwidth communications along with rapid execution.

[vundercind]

The amount of productivity lost to make it quicker for some PM to add a bar graph to a PowerPoint emailed to an exec, that the exec will look at for five seconds and move on if they even bother to open the email, is astounding.