This came to me this morning while waiting for a server to restart.

  1. Create a list of items you would / could champion within the organization. These do not have to be within your sphere of influence.
  2. Remove the things that would not survive a meeting with your boss.
  3. Remove the things that would not survive a meeting with your counterpart’s boss.

Hopefully you still have something left on your list. Anything left is now only constrained by resources (time, money, people) but is still something you can start to action on.

Some more on constraints:

  • Often Time as a constraint is a red-herring; if something is important to a person, they will find a way to make it happen.
  • Money is less of an issue than it was 15 years ago. Can’t afford commercial tool X? Use open-source tools A, B and C which offer the same functionality.
  • People is the only real constraint these days but with the rise of voip and vpns the pool of talent you have to draw upon is global. And a number of people working this global space are more than willing to be brought in for a 3 week build system re-write project and then are off to the next cool thing.

I think all team leads / managers should have a list of this sort just in case a few cycles appear in the schedule. Of course, I don’t reccomend that you try to implement everything on the list at once as you will likely end up with too many fires going at once and too many context switches to be effective.