Priorities

We are a little short handed on the software development team. The workload is increasing though. Things were getting just too crazy at work this week. We have production trouble tickets to attend to. We just released some new functionality to our customer’s acceptance test team. They are generating trouble tickets as well. Finally we have new features to implement. My head was turning with all of this work on my plate.

I put out a call for help. What I asked my team lead and manager was the relative priority of these tasks. The manager set a definite order of priorities from top to bottom. Then seeing how we had a number of high priority items, had me and the other key members of the team divide and conquer the list. The result was a less stressful environment. There is still a lot of work to do. But at least I am not getting killed.

These types of management tasks should have been done already. You need to either conduct resource balancing to ensure people are not over worked, or set priorities and let the low priority tasks slip. I would think that a proactive manager would attend to these tasks,. But I am not against encouraging this get done. After all, I am directed affected by the chaos otherwise.