Getting In The Right Lane Early

This is my first post after driving from San Francisco to my new home of Chicago. I was very fortunate to have the chance to see a lot of this country and some of it is staggeringly beautiful. But there is one site that is common to many places I could have done without: the glare of brake lights from stopped traffic on the freeway. Sometimes it was due to an unplanned event with no forewarning, which is understandable. But many times it was in areas of construction as lanes narrowed where cars tried to merge at the last moment.

This last minute merging reminded me of a lot of the work I have done over the years on projects. While there was ample time to catch issues and alter course if the team was constantly being updated, the end results of trying to come together to deliver the MVP often seemed rushed and congested. Sometimes this was the fault of folks working in isolation and not seeing the updates in their expected channels and sometimes this was the fault of other teammates not communicating changes that might impact the work beyond their immediate scope. Both are problematic for sure and they have at the core the same underlying issue: communication efficiency.   

This communication issue has a lot of causes and there are a lot of possible solutions for these issues. Overlaying yet another system for emailing/slacking/IRCing/memoing changes as they occur is all well and good, much the same way that the sign a mile in advance of the lane closure is a great solution. The communication must happen in channels that is accessible and expected.  

Back to our road trip, if all the lane closure warnings were only broadcast on AM radio, theoretically that should be sufficient, as it is exceedingly rare that a car would not have a radio capable of picking up that signal. The highway department can blast out all the facts it thinks will help drivers, such as when to change lanes, when to slow down, best practices, etc, and could count themselves as having 'communicated' this information. Of course this is silly, since almost no one would likely be tuned into that station all the time. But this is how a lot of people treat email. Of course everyone has an email address or 2 or 3, but the likelihood of the individual checking in near real time to detect any updates is low. 

Communicating across different channels might seem overwhelming at first, but if constructed correctly your communication mechanisms should be able to automate most of the lifting. Ultimately having a single source of truth on a project that, when updated, pushes the changes to the interested parties across all the appropriate channels is the attainable dream worth chasing. Make sure you are broadcasting and putting up road signs and flashers and doing all you can to signal the issue early.   

The other issue with the communication is not with the alerting system, but with people not following the advice fast enough. On the road, people see the sign and ignore it until the last possible second, as they were advancing quite well up to that point. Suddenly the lanes ahead are filled with brake lights as the cars cluster to allow one car from each lane to interweave at around 5 MPH. If everyone would have merged in the previous mile at 45 MPH, there would be no slowdown much below that and everyone would be much happier. No matter how logical that sounds on paper, every single time there will be a slowdown as people merge, assuming there are a lot of cars present.  

There is not a single great cure here I don't think aside from perhaps education. If the road rules are clear enough and everyone understands the value of merging early and the overall design of the system, perhaps they will respond better to changes as they occur. If you have mapped out how your processes work, it should be pretty easy to get everyone on board with the ideas and give everyone a chance to raise a voice to help improve your workflows. This might seem like a little too much overhead if your team is small, but a lot of larger organizations would love to go back to their smaller days and implement such underlying systems earlier.  

You might not be experiencing enough traffic on your road to see these merge conditions as an issue. A small team has less likelihood of lane merge collisions. As teams grow the bottlenecks become more and more pronounced. Having clear lanes defined early and clearly goes a long way to preventing bottlenecks. This is as true in your organization as it is on the road. Drive safe our there!