Amy Kennedy Leadership

Some years ago I inherited a way of tracking a coarse-grained backlog. It ran across three separate places, held together by a method that was fiddly and undocumented. Eventually we dropped the fiddly part. The change-over was easy, the backlog functioned, and I would do the same thing again. The backlog has also grown steadily…

I observed a team decide to transfer ownership of a shared responsibility to one of the team members. They wrote down the decision but didn’t change any of the processes. The responsibility still lacked a strong owner, and everything operated the way it always had. Nothing changed about the problems that prompted the decision in…

A date on your project moves, and not by your choice: a client shifts a launch, a conference moves, a dependency slips. You sit down to review the plan, and within minutes the conversation isn’t about the schedule anymore. It’s about what the work was supposed to deliver to begin with. That second conversation is…

I worked on a team that provides high-volume data services, and I designed an interface change to open it up to new partners. I knew the format, I knew the team, and it had been years since anyone had changed the interface. I had documentation on every field. What the documentation didn’t say was that…

The Scorecard runs first. Five to 15 numbers, five minutes, each owner saying on track or off track. Then Rocks, same two words, same five minutes. The Scorecard owner is reading a result: somebody counted something against a goal set before the quarter started, and the two words are what the count came to. The…

I was the project manager for a church building that ran from 2019 to 2022, straight through COVID. It moved and crashed at the speed of construction. Supply chains fell apart, everyone involved was spending more than they meant to, and the only way to make it stop was to finish. If a decision could…

Week 9 of the quarter. The Rock owner says “on track,” and it’s true. They’re confident, they have reason to be, and nothing in the room is wrong. At the quarterly, the Rock gets marked done and someone asks what changed, and the answer is surprising, because what got built isn’t quite the thing written…

A community organization I’m part of has spent a year trying to grow its membership. A committee of volunteers meets once a month to move it forward, and every meeting opens the same way: ten or fifteen minutes spent rebuilding where things stood, because the last conversation was four weeks and a hundred other responsibilities…

Several years ago I worked on a small team doing a critical project. All at once, we multiplied to three separate teams covering adjacent areas in non-adjacent spaces. The governing decisions lived on a whiteboard, and someone photographed that board and sent the pictures out to the teams that didn’t share the room. Low rent,…

For a few weeks now I’ve pointed you toward the diagnostic. I’ve said it takes about 10 minutes and gives you a read on where your work is exposed. I haven’t told you what comes back. So you’ve meant to take it, and every time, something with a clearer payoff got the 10 minutes instead.…

You have a project that’s been with you a while. It hasn’t gotten dramatically worse. No deadline slipped, no one escalated it. It sits there, a little heavier each month, and you would like to deal with the part that keeps routing back to you. It doesn’t get dealt with, because nothing about it forces…

Ask someone on a distributed team what they’d change about how their work is set up. Not the people, not the tools, the structure of how the work holds together. Most of them answer in about three seconds. The speed of that answer means the problem was never hard to find. So why is the…

A team ran a product launch last year. The people who built the original launch process had moved on, and the team didn’t track them down. The process was recorded in a way that carried its own reasoning, so they applied it to a situation the authors had never seen and ran the launch. No…

New quarter planning opens with a review of last quarter. You ask what is measurably different because of the work the team did, and the answers come fast: a backlog worked down, a release shipped, urgent problems handled the week they surfaced. Then the question turns to the business itself, and the activity doesn’t add…

Every team has someone who knows the work from the inside. She was there when the approach was decided. She knows why that constraint exists, what was tried before, and what that means for anything similar now. When she is in the room, work moves. When she is not, things slow in ways that are…