[QuercusMax]

One project at a time? How on earth can that possibly work? I always ask to have multiple projects to work on, because getting blocked is a real thing, and having other work you can still pursue will ensure you keep things moving! Perhaps my definition of project is very different from yours?

[jamesfinlayson]

I am friendly with a project manager at work - he's overseeing a fairly big modernisation project with lots of stakeholders, lots of moving parts, lots of direct reports, and while he seems to have a lot of long lunches, he makes sure that no one working on the project is blocked - he'll do everything he needs to to unblock people - regular meetings to hear about blockers, chase down approvers, just tell his direct reports to do something without approval (as long as it's not something bad) and he'll deal with the consequences. But most people are not this dedicated unfortunately.

[transitorykris]

Single Piece Flow fits with other Toyota ideas of how to get high quality work done. If something is frequently blocking the line, the solution is to put resources toward the bottleneck, not spin up more work in parallel.

[QuercusMax]

Building software isn't the same as building cars. Some ideas needs months or years to be realized, and there's only so fast you can realistically move.

[jurgenburgen]

When is multi-tasking ever productive? The biggest time sink is understanding the problem. I can’t understand two different problems at the same time.

[QuercusMax]

How did you manage to go to school and handle multiple subjects at the same time? It's exactly the same thing.

I'm not talking about multitasking on a moment by moment basis. I'm talking about over the course of a day or week you have multiple reponsibilities. That's the most normal thing ever.

For example, current projects I'm working on include:

  - Babysitting a weeks-long data migration
  - Designing a better storage system for some parts our data
  - Implementing data cleanup for customers who have offboarded
  - Code hygiene improvements across the codebase to support static analyzers
  - Planning committee work for upcoming hackathon

And that's just me - I'm not even a team lead. Other people on my team are working on different things within our team scope.

[specialist]

For troubleshooting, esp blockers, I totally agree.

[onion2k]

Projects can be broken down into parallel pieces of work, so you should always be able to pick up another part of the project rather than switch to a different project if you're blocked. As the other poster says, the goal is to not be blocked though. The leadership team need to support the delivery team to get the work done as a focused flow of items with as little blocking and waiting time as possible. If you're getting blocked, that's a signal that the org is failing.

Admittedly this is a little idealistic, but if it's not the goal then the reality is always far worse.

[QuercusMax]

That's why I say the definition is "project" is key to this.

And what about investigating and fixing bugs? Bug reports don't come in on a schedule, and they're necessarily interrupt-driven unless you just don't care about your customers.