How many complex things can a human do at the same time?
It’s not a trick question. The answer should come to you immediately. Correct, it’s one.
Doing more than one complex thing at the same time leads to terrible outcomes. Take driving and using a mobile phone as the extreme example.
In product teams — who often focus on a single goal for many weeks at a time — there are strict limits on work in progress. A person can be assigned to only one thing. Teams work on one thing per team member, minus one thing to ensure redundancy.
In agencies these rules are often less clearly defined, and sometimes don’t exist. People are commonly multi-assigned. They could be spending time across two or more projects, while also covering support agreement work.
It’s not uncommon for me to see people assigned to ten or more tickets. Yes 1-0, ten.
Why? How? What?!?
Those tickets are in stasis. Purgatory. They’re Schrödinger’s tickets. They’re both in progress and absolutely not in progress.
As if you need other reasons why you should be encouraging or mandating a limit to individual work in progress in your agency, here are three.
Blocking work. If a person is assigned to ten tickets, nine of those tickets aren’t being worked on. Those nine tickets are also unavailable to be picked up and progressed by other people.
Visibility of bottlenecks and progress. To mark work as in progress — when it’s not — can mask the true situation across reporting tools and reviews.
Silo’d knowledge. Any progress which has been made is rarely documented against the ticket. It’s kept in a person’s subconscious, or in unshared code, or personal notes.
To get the precious information in the ticket admittedly takes time, which multi-assigned people don’t have much of. But ironically if information was always stored against the ticket, then those tickets could be unassigned and made available to others.
Or at the very least put back to ready to be picked up again later when you’ve finished the last ticket.
Context switching and rapidly changing priorities can encourage increased ticket assignment. The belief is you’ll ‘just’ get another thing done then jump back to the real priority, only to find yet another priority comes along.
Ultimately, completing things feels good. Real progress is important. Having fewer open loops fosters focus, better work and more positive healthy ways of working.
However temping it is to allow that fifth ticket to be assigned — which they might get to tomorrow, or not — instead leave it in the ready column. It’s ok for tickets to be unassigned and instead just prioritised accurately. Tickets get done if they’re truly a priority.
So actively encourage moving tickets back to ready and removing assignment. Just ensure there is an expectation that information is shared in the comments and details fields first.