Sarah Smith
2 min readJan 1, 2021

--

Think about your team dynamics as "ways of working" instead of using the loaded term "process". Its always cool & edgy to say we don't want process. But everyone has ways of working even if its the "Lord of the Flies", approach where some think they're being loose & free while others think the team lacks focus & fails to make commitments or deliver on them. Show me any "low process", edge of the seat, team full of free spirits and I'll show you a bunch of quiet sullen co-workers who are sick & tired of picking up after the mess that those self-styled mavericks leave behind. So given we're going to do that - make, share & deliver on commitments - and we're in COVID times, so paper cards & over-the-shoulder stuff doesn't work, what online tool do we propose to use? Team dynamics and project delivery is an inherently complex problem, and any tool used to model it for distributed teams is either not up to the job or is just as complex. I've used Trello with a bunch of home hacks in JS, Pivotal Tracker, I've used Jira, and I've used Clickup. They're all just as bad and as good as each other. For Clickup the work of managing that complexity was enough that I hired someone to help me with it - not because it was beyond me, it was just work: and it needed doing, so I made a choice to hire someone to do it so I could do other work. Its complex, important and time-critical work. I think the idea we can somehow dispense with it is not that productive as a notion. Certainly the folks who are doing that work deserve credit.

--

--

Sarah Smith
Sarah Smith

Written by Sarah Smith

Sarah Smith is a writer & app developer .

No responses yet