No: Such a Difficult Word

Figure 1: Pat's portfolio

Pat does her best to help everybody take on new work (projects 1 and 2) while still assigning everyone some support. It's difficult to predict how much support each application will require, so she assigns everyone some support work. She has no idea how to staff project 3, so she does the work on that project for a while.

Note that Pat makes it difficult for people to work together to finish work jointly. Each person has a different set of new work (project 1 or 2) and a different set of support work. That means people can't work together. If they need to talk to someone, that will always be an interruption and cause multitasking.

Pat's manager thinks her portfolio looks like figure 2. It's common for senior managers to have a simplified view of the project portfolio and to think the project team can get more work done. Notice that Pat's manager doesn't realize that Project3, Project4, and Project5 are all unstaffed. And, Pat's manager doesn't know about the support work. Managers may well forget all about the support that many development teams (developers, testers, analysts, writers, whomever) have unless the support work is not done.

In reality, Pat's project portfolio looks like Figure 3. 

Once Pat has a picture of all the work in her group, she can have a conversation about which work to staff and which work to say no to. And, she can build a more realistic picture of the overall project portfolio with her peers so their boss can see what they are really doing.

When Pat shows her manager her portfolio, he says, "I had no idea you were working on all those projects. What's this business with support?" Now, they can have a conversation about all the work she and her team are trying to complete.

After discussing her current portfolio with her manager, Pat decides to tackle the "no" problem. "What would you say if I said no to more work?"

"Well, I'd think you were turning me down for a good reason. I'd probably want to see how people are allocated, to make sure everyone is working on the most important work. But I wouldn't fire you over a no."

Now, Pat and her manager meet biweekly to discuss how everyone is assigned to projects and for how long. Everyone is working on just one project during a week, and people are taking turns on the support work. She's also queued up the support work so team members don't have to interrupt what they are doing to manage it.

No is not easy to say in the