It may seem paradoxical, but you often get more done by doing less, better.

Delivery slow 🐢? Expectations and deadlines regularly being missed 📅? All too often it’s because teams are just trying to do too much at the same time.

Think of a congested motorway, frequently caused by nothing more than too many vehicles trying to go too fast. Smart motorways solve this by reducing the speed limit, meaning everyone gets where they’re going more quickly.

Larger organisations trying to do too much can be very inefficient, further exacerbated by dependencies between teams and complex org structures creating competing initiatives, akin to a city gridlocked at rush hour.

Why better as well as less? You didn’t plan for misunderstanding requirements, didn’t plan for code becoming more complex and harder to change, didn’t plan to fail QA, didn’t plan for it to break something in production.

These are all things more likely to happen when you’re juggling too much work at the same time (and they all slow you down), but won’t necessarily improve by just doing less. If you’ve been working this way, bad practices are probably baked in culturally.

📉 Doing less 📉

⚠️ Reduce and limit the amount of work in progress at any one time (see WIP limits)
🔪 Break work down into the smallest possible deliverables
✅ Focus on getting things done before picking up new work

🌟 Doing less, better 🌟

🎯 Ruthless prioritisation to ensure you’re always focusing on the work that will have the most impact
🤝 Make sure outcomes and requirements are clear and agreed before you start new work
👩‍👩‍👦‍👦 Take collective ownership and work as a team rather than passing tasks between silo’s
🔧 For engineers, focus on writing maintainable and well unit tested code, so it’s easy to change and reduces the likelihood of introducing bugs.

What practices have you found help create better focus, streamline delivery and get more done as a consequence?