I once started a contract at a company where I was working with a permie on this hugely popular site running off the God-awful blogging software. Everything was a fire that had to be put out RIGHT NOW. And there were two of us.
Coworker had earned himself a reputation for being unhelpful and unproductive. This was partly because he had sociopathically bad communication skills and hated people, but he actually worked hard, and productively. But everyone thought he was lazy and didn't get shit done.
Essentially his workflow was: work on a task. Someone comes and says "DROP EVERYTHING, YOU NEED TO ADD A WIDGET TO THE BLOG NOW". So he would start on that, and 3 hours later, someone would come to him and say DROP EVERYTHING. And three weeks later, he'd struggle to explain why he hadn't done much of it.
So we (well, I) split the work in to Stories. We estimated them, and stuck them up on the wall behind us. We found someone who was meant to be the Product Owner. Whenever anyone came to ask us anything, I'd intercept them from talking to the coworker, ask them for details on the task, estimate it, and put all this on a card. I'd then call over the Product Owner, and with the Requestor, we'd put it on the Story Board.
Suddenly items weren't /that/ important any more. With the opportunity cost suddenly marked out, many things found themselves inserted far below the current task being worked on. We'd burn down time against each task. We could tell you where we'd spent our time, and also, we could tell you what we'd achieved recently.
Essentially then, with a very small amount of overhead (like learning these terms ;-)) we suddenly had a system for prioritization and accountability. I did very little programming in the six weeks I was there - the productivity gains we saw - both real and perceived - made it look like there were 5 of me working fulltime.
I once started a contract at a company where I was working with a permie on this hugely popular site running off the God-awful blogging software. Everything was a fire that had to be put out RIGHT NOW. And there were two of us.
Coworker had earned himself a reputation for being unhelpful and unproductive. This was partly because he had sociopathically bad communication skills and hated people, but he actually worked hard, and productively. But everyone thought he was lazy and didn't get shit done.
Essentially his workflow was: work on a task. Someone comes and says "DROP EVERYTHING, YOU NEED TO ADD A WIDGET TO THE BLOG NOW". So he would start on that, and 3 hours later, someone would come to him and say DROP EVERYTHING. And three weeks later, he'd struggle to explain why he hadn't done much of it.
So we (well, I) split the work in to Stories. We estimated them, and stuck them up on the wall behind us. We found someone who was meant to be the Product Owner. Whenever anyone came to ask us anything, I'd intercept them from talking to the coworker, ask them for details on the task, estimate it, and put all this on a card. I'd then call over the Product Owner, and with the Requestor, we'd put it on the Story Board.
Suddenly items weren't /that/ important any more. With the opportunity cost suddenly marked out, many things found themselves inserted far below the current task being worked on. We'd burn down time against each task. We could tell you where we'd spent our time, and also, we could tell you what we'd achieved recently.
Essentially then, with a very small amount of overhead (like learning these terms ;-)) we suddenly had a system for prioritization and accountability. I did very little programming in the six weeks I was there - the productivity gains we saw - both real and perceived - made it look like there were 5 of me working fulltime.