How to Win When Nothing is Going Right
Fixing Your Issues Before You Can Succeed
How many times have you seen a NASCAR race and said, “damn, that clunker really blew them away!”
None, right? It’s because the car wasn’t a clunker. It was built and maintained for the race. It had regular updates, care, and repairs so that it could function optimally - and win.
And your system just might be suffering the same fate. If you aren’t allowing time and space to fix issues, perform regular maintenance, and update when necessary, you’ll probably never win your race.
If you’ve ever felt like you just can’t win no matter how hard you try, you’ve most likely heard one of three things:
You’re not trying hard enough
You just need a plan
Maybe it’s just not for you
But what if none of these are right?
If you’ve worked your rear off with a plan and abandoned ship just because it doesn’t feel like it’s for you, there might be some underlying issue- either in yourself or your existing systems.
Learning the Hard Way
Back at my old job, when I was chosen to lead a pilot agile team for a national, billion dollar company, I quickly saw that the team struggled every day. Their former management had just been throwing whatever new request or bug that came at him. He’d hold weekly meetings with stakeholders and update a poorly compiled excel sheet to track new issues and requests, and progress crawled.
Once I got into the position of caring not only for the projects but the team, I got to work categorizing all of the bugs and requests. I notated what type, how often they happened, and how much time they stole from the team.
And then the hardest part came: convincing leadership to pause new requests for 3 months so we could do major bug fixes and business-empowering enhancements (new functionality that allowed the business to perform certain updates without bothering/distracting IT).
Three months later, we had reduced the intake of bugs and production/operational requests by 66%.
That gave us not only the bandwidth to work on new projects, but also:
gave the business freedom to do some things whenever they needed, and
reduced the headache and stress of bugs for both IT and business
You see, we (IT and business) couldn’t win because we had too much crap to fix, too much slowing us down, too many interruptions. Once we resolved the vast majority, we were knocking out 10+ major projects every quarter.
We began to win.
Take Aways
So if you’re feeling like you just can’t win, start here:
Write down all of the issues in your path
Categorize and quantify them
Make a plan to eliminate or reduce them
Do it
Give yourself a few months (or even a year) to really get your car ready for the race, and I promise, you’ll be winning in no time.
Ready to improve your resiliency?
If you want to go deeper with me, then subscribe to my Substack to receive the more specific training via email! I’ll be posting insights, exercises, and more on Substack in upcoming weeks!
If you know someone that’s struggling and in need of some resiliency, please do share the post and publication!
Selena - 1st I want to say kudos for using your voice and standing up for what you knew to be the best path forwards. As an ex multi-billion dollar corporate executive myself, I know that it's not easy to change the course of such a large ship.
2nd I wanted to say hi 👋🏽 and share that I fould you from @Malick Abdullah who recommended you as a read. Tag - you're it, let's keep the chain going by recommending others.