How do small teams make sure recurring tasks don't slip?

Question

In small teams(~10), a lot of important work is recurring and operational: checks, reports, maintenance, follow-ups.These tasks are rarely complex, but they&rsquo;re easy to forget or assume "someone did it".How do you assign and track recurring work in a small team?Do you: - use task managers? - calendars? - informal routines? - just trust it gets done?What actually works long-term?

scrapheap · Accepted Answer

Where possible automate them!From my point of view the power of automation for recurring tasks is less to do with time saved, and more to do with making sure that it will get done and be done the same way every time.Bonus tip: log the outputs of automated tasks when they run, but only send out notifications of errors - that way you don't train staff to ignore the notifications from the task just because they see it every time the job runs, and instead seeing a notification from it is rare, so they know they need to investigate.

codingdave · Answer

If your team is small, it must be people who are organized and trustworthy enough that you don't need to micro-manage them and track their work. If you find things are slipping through the cracks, you don't have the correct small team. The key hiring focus when you are that small is: "Is this person good enough that I can simply tell them to get it done and it will happen, so I can go work on other things?"