Meeting Team Leader needs

Being a Team Leader can be both stressful and time-consuming. Our primary responsibility is to ensure that the team remains productive and collaborates effectively toward achieving a common goal. However, this is easier said than done. Our duties involve various aspects:

• From a people perspective, we must communicate goals clearly, coordinate work assignments, nurture team members’ growth, and monitor their progress.
• From a project standpoint, we need to ensure that the team completes assigned tasks on time and delivers them with the highest possible quality, all while keeping relevant stakeholders informed of progress.

Based on interviews with multiple team leads, the main challenges faced in this role include:

• Team members not adhering to processes.
• Difficulty in assessing individual productivity.
• Lack of autonomy among team members, requiring excessive supervision.
• Unrealistic goals set for the team, coupled with insufficient team maturity.
• Uncertainty about how to identify when the team falls behind schedule.

If these ones match your experience, keep reading to learn how Qanban tackles them to improve team alignment.

How Qanban solve your pain?

Qanban addresses alignment challenges comprehensively and simultaneously across various levels, aiming for complete end-to-end consistency and optimal alignment. With Qanban handling the heavy lifting, you can concentrate on your core responsibilities.

Alignment on team level

Whether you’re a newcomer or a seasoned member of the team, grasping the projects underway and the team’s composition is vital. This insight offers essential data to gauge whether the team possesses sufficient capacity to meet project demands. With just a few clicks, upon entering each project, Qanban furnishes team-level details, displaying the work items allocated to your team for execution. 

Qanban acknowledges that each team may need tailored processes based on its maturity level. Qanban facilitates the breakdown of statuses into stages like Analysis, Ready For Development, In Development, In QA, etc., providing enhanced flexibility and more process granularity in the team. While teams have the autonomy to create stories and tasks independently, Qanban mandates linking these items to specific project epics or features to ensure all efforts are directed towards the correct epics and features, minimising wasted efforts. Additionally, it enables you to comprehend dependencies and understand all tasks necessary for each epic and feature.

Regularly monitoring progress at a detailed level is essential to ensure that the project team is on track. Qanban offers progress reports accessible at both the project and team levels so that both team leads and project manager can align. These reports provide valuable insights into work item completion patterns and the likelihood of meeting deadlines for each projects. Additionally, they highlight when new requirements are introduced to the team, allowing you to assess risk and their impact on the timeline. 

Qanban offers the Team Rules Management feature to improve team processes. This feature allows you to pre-define assignees or specify which team should handle work items at different stages of your workflow. As tasks are moved to specific columns, they will automatically be assigned to the appropriate individuals or passed to different teams as needed.

Alignment on project level

For team leaders, having transparency in project management is vital. It’s particularly important in larger organisations where quickly accessing this information is necessary for addressing urgent inquiries about specific initiatives. In Qanban, each project is accompanied by a description detailing its purpose and identifying the person in charge. This improves clarity regarding roles, responsibilities, and ownership of initiatives at the project level. Additionally, Qanban provides a comprehensive overview of all involved teams and their leaders, ensuring that accurate and centralised information is accessible to everyone. Understanding who leads specific initiatives allows for effective communication of instructions and articulation of organisational goals. 

To maintain transparency and alignment with the project scope, Qanban offers a project structure feature that showcases all necessary work items for project completion. Additionally, within each project, the “Project Deliverables” provides a summary of the required larger epics and features requirement to be delivered while the “Project Work Items” feature enables Product Owners or Business Analysts to create smaller user requirements and tasks before assigning them to respective teams for execution. This ensures that requirements are not overlooked, and project teams can clearly see and track them. 

Qanban acknowledges that as part of your responsibilities, conducting workshops to gather work estimations is crucial for understanding the size of each requirement and planning accordingly. Each epic, feature, user requirement, and task includes fields for individual business value and estimated effort, which can be captured from the project team. This facilitates determining priority based on perceived business value and estimated effort, thus providing guidance on the sequence of work.

Alignment on team member level

Occasionally, you may need swift visibility into individual team members’ tasks, especially if they encounter recurring deadline issues. The User Workload feature, accessible within each team, provides an overview of individuals’ current tasks and upcoming assignments providing managers a comprehensive understanding of stakeholder capacity and productivity, promoting transparency and awareness. 

What’s Next?

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