[thelist] Day-to-day workflow related questions

[Steve Cook]

Hmmm - just found this thread. Interesting!

I've been struggling with some similar issues as well. There are 2 of us
here in the web department and my job description is web strategist, but
includes development. I've bashed heads with a few people over being asked
to do things that don't fall into my job description at all, but which
everyone assumes do (server maintenance, PC maintenance issues, creating
company presentations etc).

After a month where we seemed completely unable to get any of our central
work done, I decided enough was enough and closed the door to my office!
This got a *lot* of people's backs up, but gave me the time to step back
from my workload and plan where the hell we were with all our projects, work
out how much time we were spending on development vs internal work and
devise a strategy to firefight our situation.

When I came out again, I had to explain clearly to other people in the
company what our role is. I explained that the last few weeks we had been
working 90% on internal projects, and hardly at all on either client /
development work. I asked people to mail me requests wherever possible, I
explained that the web department now had a 4 tier system, where really
urgent tasks could float to the top of the queue, but that otherwise we
would focus primarily on client work (perhaps 25% of our time, but the most
important as it's paid!), followed by site development (50% of our time and
our primary role) and 25% on internal issues. I also explained that
regarding internal issues we would be as honest as possible - if presented
with a task, we will try and give a good estimate of when we will be able to
get to it.

Since then I've had to firefight much less. It reallly got people's backs up
at first, but now people will actually stop and think before approaching us.
The difficult part is striking the right terror balance between being
approachable (you don't want people avoiding you in a crisis situation) and
being in control of your workflow. It helps that I'm part of the management
group of the company (though even so our MD has had a word or two with me
about the situation, though he's mostly left me to handle it myself). If you
have a very strong boss, or little authority it could be harder to pull off.
However I generally find that whenever I'm snowed under, taking the time to
sit and plan what I'm doing pays off no end, even if it only clears the
picture enough for me to be able to explain to others why everything is
behind.

Good luck with the situation. As I say, try starting by listing everything
you have on the table and seeing which bits you can reprioritise.

.steve

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