Program tactics is a newsletter for program managers. I write about tactics and strategies to help anyone level up their career and impact (mostly around tech, but applied broadly).
PT#009 Flow and Force - Program Tactics
Program Tactics #009 - Flow and Force
"There is a time to let things happen, and a time to make things happen." - Anonymous
Estimated reading time: 3 mins
Leaving it up to chance
If you're like me, you might have more projects than time or attention to manage and can't watch everything carefully.
Which ones should you carefully manage? Which projects do you leave as low touch?
The maximalist would be on top of everything and probably get burned out. The minimalist would be reactive to everything and not engaged enough. The balance between these two extremes is flow and force.
Context applies in flow and force
Attention should always go to the most critical projects in the portfolio. It's sometimes easy to forget this rule when we chase shiny objects or easy wins (guilty).
It doesn't matter if the most critical projects are low scope, low effort, or well understood-- they should still be managed carefully.
Which projects are most critical?
You can usually spot these because they receive the most senior leadership interest, the most customer demand, potential for increased revenue, or how much of your project is an enabler for the previous reasons.
For example, an infrastructure project that will enable the product to grow and scale while improving monitoring and maintainability is actually important even if the product facing teams don't realize it yet.
Use a mix of input from the org, technical depth, and judgement to make the right prioritization decisions. You can also confirm your decisions with your management chain for validation.
Tactic: Flow and Force (a real example)
I had a critical project where we had to upgrade many databases in the cloud while reducing the downtime of affected customers. It was simple-- get change control approval, do it during low times, communicate to customers as needed, then rinse and repeat.
I didn't think it deserved much of my attention for how simple it seemed and how loaded my plate was. Like any program, we met to do the deep dive, the kick off, and assigned responsibilities. The team requested to do everything async over slack-- great, I'll flow with that.
Except week after week the project didn't make progress and a pattern emerged. I knew it was time to be the forcing function.
I scheduled regular short meetings on the topic with 15 mins once a week. The team was resistant to meeting, so I sold it to the team as a quick checkin that we can cancel or end early and made sure I kept my promise.
Results
In the beginning, we had more to talk about and used all of the 15 minutes-- this was to everyone else's surprise, but not mine.
In the weeks that followed, we continued to hold the meeting every week. We went from doing 2 databases a month to 2 databases a week (4x increase) simply by getting the team to meet and talk it out for a few minutes. Our meetings eventually got so fast we were ending before the 5 minute mark.
Why didn't I just schedule the meetings in the first place?
I believe in empowering people to work the best ways for them (flow). They had the opportunity to solve the problem, but it didn't get solved-- and it's okay. That's where using your judgement as a program manager and becoming the forcing function comes into play.
It's more than that
If we're talking about trust, building it with your team starts with taking small risks. When you trust them to get the job done the way they want to (flow) and it doesn't happen, then you can be the forcing function as necessary. Just use your judgement on when you can flow.
In the end, you'll end up with a big gain in trust and credibility.
-Matt
P.S. Raffle Update
A big thank you to everyone who submitted the subscriber feedback survey (the raffle has closed but feedback is welcome).
You all had great ideas so I am taking a step back to re-imagine the direction of this newsletter.
If you are interested in participating in a small group to help me create, shape, or just give feedback about the reimagined newsletter, reply to this email with your interest (thank you for reading this far).
Who were the 5 raffle winners?
- Japneet K.
- Valerie F.
- Asha A.
- Raghav K.
- Azmina J.
It was great connecting with you all!
P.P.S. I am expecting my son to be born in the next few weeks and with that, it's also good reason to disconnect for the holidays. If you don't hear from me, I'll be back as soon as I thaw out!
Program Tactics Newsletter
Program tactics is a newsletter for program managers. I write about tactics and strategies to help anyone level up their career and impact (mostly around tech, but applied broadly).
Program Tactics - The end and the beginning “Every morning we are born again. What we do today matters most.” – Buddha Endings become new beginnings Hi there, tap tap is this thing still on? It’s been a minute since I’ve written here. I wanted to let you know I’m retiring this blog/email, Program Tactics. This should come as no surprise, since it's been a long time since my last newsletter. In fact, you might be wondering "how did I end up on this email list?" because of how long it's been....
Program Tactics #008 - Timing is everything "Either you run the day, or the day runs you." - Jim Rohn Estimated reading time: 2.5 mins Are you timing your messages wrong? Let's take two program managers. They both have an important program that they're running and need to ask for an update on a deliverable from their team. One requests an update first thing in the morning. The other one sometime after lunch. One of them made a mistake in their approach. Timing makes all the difference Here's...
Program Tactics #007 - Soft skills don't exist “The soft skills are the hard skills.” - Amy Edmondson Estimated reading time: 3 mins Soft skills aren't real You've probably heard that program managers need soft skills in order to thrive in their role. In fact, I'm guilty because I often say they are one of the fastest ways to grow your career. The truth is soft skills aren't real, yet we're all expected to do them. We all know what hard skills are: they're tangible things like project...