How to make sense of what your team is working on in chaotic times

How daily bullet points gave me clarity

It has been a journey going back to Ministry of Testing last month in a CEO role. It wasn’t a planned situation and the best way I can describe it is as ‘chaotic’.

Chaos brings so many questions, anxiety and confusion. One of my main priorities was to get the lowdown on what was actually happening. I needed to work towards making decisions quickly, but I didn’t want to make them without having the right information and understanding.

One of the processes we implemented really helped me gain clarity on what was actually happening on a day-to-day basis. For context, this is for a total team of 10.

We called it “Today my priorities are” and it exists as a Slack channel that everyone posts to in the morning. This was not created to judge what people were working on, it was a communication tool of the team saying “hey, this is what I’m working on, AMA.”

What this helped me with was to understand:

• what people were working on
• what they actually got done
• whether it made sense to me
• what currently exists (and to then explore it if need be)
• it was an opportunity for me to ask for guidance and help
• it helped me understand the picture as a whole and to assess for gaps or risks