Raising Your Game — How to Get Organised as an Engineering Manager
Tips on How to Create Order Out Of Chaos.
I work with a number of engineering managers who have made or are making the transition to management. One conversation comes up time and time again;
“How do you organise everything?”
As a new manager, as you start your transition, you start taking on extra responsibilities, getting involved in more and more pieces of work in and around your team. You keep all the items you need to do in your head but they start to build up…
That presentation you need to prepare.
That sprint planning you need to run.
That report your head of department has asked you to prepare.
The difficult 1+1 conversation you need to have.
Stack Overflow.
At a certain point, the number of things you need to stay on top of becomes too much and you buckle. You drop the ball, miss a deadline, or forget something important, and you realise you need to get better organised.
The number of plates you need to keep spinning as a manager typically is greater than an engineer. As an individual contributor, you value focus, being able to work on one activity with few interruptions to get the job done before moving on to the next activity. Context switching is a killer that you try to avoid at all costs. As a manager, your job is regularly handling multiple things at the same time, constantly context-switching. The transition can be hard to handle.
How do we solve this?
The key to success is getting extremely well organised. I believe it is one of the key reasons why I’ve been able to be successful in my endeavors. I preach great organisational skills as the core of being a successful manager to everyone I work with. In software engineering teams, we use agile techniques to deliver effectively, and we can use those same techniques to manage ourselves. The main components are;
- Breaking large tasks into smaller manageable ones.
- Maintaining a prioritised backlog of tasks and regularly reviewing them.
- Estimating effort and assigning dates to work.
Let’s look at each of these in turn and discuss what they look like in the context of getting organised as a manager.
Breaking large tasks into smaller manageable ones.
Breaking large tasks down into smaller manageable ones is an effective strategy for getting organised, particularly when dealing with complex or overwhelming projects. The idea is to divide the larger task into smaller, more manageable components that can be tackled one at a time, reducing stress and increasing productivity.
It is psychologically rewarding to see yourself completing small tasks regularly. By breaking down a large piece of work into smaller manageable tasks, you are able to see progress which makes you feel good. This empowers you to keep moving forward toward your goals.
The “boulders, rocks and pebbles” analogy for breaking up work that we use in teams has the same value for our own work as managers. The key to breaking a large task down into smaller manageable ones is to start by identifying the individual items that make up the larger task. This may involve brainstorming, mind mapping, or creating a task list.
How would this work in practice? Well, let’s say you have a big task, you need to build a team roadmap and present it, perhaps we could break it down as follows;
- Schedule an initial brainstorm with team.
- Find an owner for each piece of work.
- Estimate timelines for each piece of work.
- Compile all items into a roadmap.
- Create PowerPoint deck to present.
By breaking a large task down into smaller, more manageable ones, you can approach the task with a clear plan, giving you a sense of control and direction. This allows you to prioritize each element of the task and focus on one piece at a time, making it easier to manage your time and resources effectively.
Another advantage of breaking a large task down into smaller manageable ones is that it can help to reduce procrastination and increase motivation. When a task seems too large or overwhelming, it can be tempting to put it off or delay starting it. By breaking it down into smaller components, however, you can reduce the perceived difficulty of the task, making it easier to get started and stay motivated throughout the process.
Maintaining a prioritised backlog of tasks and regularly reviewing it.
One of the key agile manifesto values is that we value responding to change over following a plan. What this means is, committing to small amounts of work at a time allows us to quickly re-prioritise work when change happens. This is a cornerstone of agile and helps us when it comes to ever-evolving priorities in your work as a manager.
Teams who follow Scrum commonly have planning sessions every 2 weeks, where they get together and discuss what they’re going to commit to over the next 2 weeks. This means that if priorities shift you can realign your goals and change your work appropriately. This enables us to potentially change our focus every 2 weeks. As a manager, it’s important to do this same action. Typically I review my priorities and adjust what I’m going to work on every single morning. It’s how I start every day, as commonplace as grabbing a morning espresso.
The idea is to maintain a list of all the tasks that need to be completed, and then prioritize them based on their relative importance and urgency. Almost every day in my life as a manager, new items come up that by default I could drop everything and work on. But urgent != important. Sometimes it makes sense to put something on the backlog, and not work on it until a later date.
Asking yourself “when does this really need to be done by?” every time you add a new item to your prioritised backlog.
By maintaining a prioritized backlog of tasks, you can ensure that you are always working on the most important tasks first, while also keeping track of what needs to be done next. This approach allows you to manage your time more effectively, ensuring that you are using your time and resources in the most productive way possible.
Estimating effort and assigning dates to work
Our work as managers is littered with deadlines. We work from one deadline to the next. The ability to think about when you want to get tasks done and assign dates to each one will empower you to focus on delivering to that timeline. In practice, this looks something like the following;
Send that email— tomorrow
Read that report — end of week
Create that presentation — next Monday
A backlog without dates is a wishlist that creates no urgency to actually get done. Remember, these dates are for your own management of your time. You decide what you want to achieve and by what timelines. If you set yourself aggressive timelines, then you will push yourself to achieve them.
Estimating effort and assigning dates to work is a valuable strategy for ensuring that projects are completed on time. By taking this approach of assigning dates to tasks, you can ensure that you are making the most of your time and resources, while also staying on track to achieve your goals.
Tooling
I use Trello for managing my work and I highly recommend it. It allows me to keep lists of items, synced across all my devices. I can create tasks, maintain a prioritised list and assign due dates to them. It’s very simple to set up and I value the simplicity. There are a plethora of tools out there to use though, the key is finding one that works for you.
Whatever tooling you use, the key is to get organised, find what works for you, and learn to manage your own time with as much rigour as you do your team. At a certain point, keeping things in your head or on post-it notes is not going to cut it.
Get organised and not only will you be a master of your own time, but you’ll achieve more and help your team to be ever more successful.
