Handling Team Warmups and Cool downs in Project delivery

Quarterly project deliveries if not handled efficiently like a planned workout can cause considerable employee strain much like the physical ones. ( Image credits: https://unsplash.com/@gabinvallet Thank you for the image. )

Handling product development delivering tasks and managing expectations of the product team, customers and deliverables can take a great toll on the people involved and the system if not managed in a systematic way. Building products for over 3 years for customers across the globe has helped me learn quite a few hacks and tips which can help teams stay focussed on development through the quarter, achieve better employee satisfaction and deliver high performance output for customers and the product. Most importantly get back the team to have similar motivation levels in the next quarter. We can call this model as the “Quarter Workout” model taking a leaf out of a workout in a Gym.

In the Workout model we divided a quarter into 4 phases with focussed objectives:

Stage 1: Pre-Quarter planning phase( akin to a pre workout meal )
Timeframe: Last week of the previous quarter

• Cool off period for the team involved in project delivery through the quarter.
• Planning and commitments on the deliverables for the coming quarter.
• Hiring as we did not want team expansion to interfere with deliverables and OKRs. Employees joining in the team will auto align early in the next quarter once they serve their entire tenure in the previous organisation.

Stage 2: Quarter warmup phase ( akin to the slight jog / wetting the feet before diving into the pool )

Timeframe: Week 1 and Week 2 of the quarter

Objectives:

• Developing team integrations between the existing team and new comers to ensure good knowledge transfer before the team heads for development aka Workout phase.
• Communication of the OKRs and deliverables to the team. Two weeks provide sufficient time for clean communication on deliverables and expectations and provides ample scope for discussion or change in roadmaps with developer inputs.

Stage 3: Delivery phase ( Main Workout phase )

Timeframe: Weeks 3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10.

Objectives:

• Sharp focussed delivery of the proposed OKRs post agreement in the warmup phase.
• Leadership team takes a cool off period intermittently without disruption in delivery.

Stage 4: Review phase ( Cool-down phase)

Timeframe: Weeks 11 and 12

Objectives:

• Relaxation time for the people working on the focussed delivery.
• Leadership gets back to the PreQuarter planning phase.

Conclusion

The key pillars for product development are employee satisfaction and focus on quality. Pacing quarters provides ample room for development, focus on quality and ample cool down period for teams to stay focussed in the coming quarters.