Team Initiatives — Stop Starting and Start Finishing

Let me know if this sounds familiar: your teammate comes up with an idea to do something great with our infrastructure, a suggestion to improve some bad process, or just a question that is worth discussing with the team, however, it stops there — in the “idea” or “suggestion” phase. How about another scenario where the team actually agrees to change something in their process, but, a few weeks later, everyone forgets about it as it wasn’t fully adopted. A week later another teammate suggests a different thing, and this cycle repeats itself.

From my experience, team behavior and processes are pretty hard to change, and too often than not, we end up sticking with old habits.

It used to happen to me all the time until we decided to facilitate a process in my group to manage the different ideas and suggestions. Instead of just talking and forgetting soon after, we wanted to make sure to implement and incorporate these ideas:

First, we created a dedicated time when team members are encouraged to present new ideas or suggestions — 1 hour every other week.

We wanted to make it visible for all and since we use Jira in our day-to-day tasks and projects, we thought why not use it here?