One of the challenges facing teams, particularly small ones, is having to balance the time spent on doing fun new things and having to support old (or antique!) systems and processes. These are the ‘business as usual’ (BAU) things which probably underpin the current revenue of your business.
As such they are critically important but are almost certainly unloved and possibly even loathed by the teams responsible for them! BAU includes fixing bugs, handling support problems, running regular or ad hoc processes, and dealing with legacy systems amongst other things.
Based on four years of experience at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, this talk presents some of these challenges and suggest tactical options for dealing with them day-to-day as well as how to go about understanding and fixing the underlying problems. The problems and solutions are not just technical: dealing with the psychological impact of the problem and how it affects teams has been one of our biggest challenges – get it wrong and productivity and turnover are badly affected, further limiting the team’s effectiveness.
You will learn: how and when to say no; when to take time to fix and optimise; how to deal with a deluge of BAU; how to manage people working on BAU; and what we experienced when we were getting it wrong and finally when we got it right!
