Gadwall was thought up during my time in the Air Force. Our unit saw a huge amount of growth in a short time. We gained around 20 new airmen in the space of less than a year, all of them fresh out of tech school and ready to get to work. Due to the nature of our work people who were organizationally supervised by one person, might not actually work on a daily basis with their supervisor. We began to have people fall through the cracks.
I began a number of things to attack the problem below are the three things that turned us around.
First
One on one walks/meetings with my team leads and supervisors. These meetings wouldn’t usually have an agenda, I’d just catch up with my leaders. We would usually touch on how their teams were doing and what we could do as an organizations to help them achieve their goals. You may think you know your team, but unless you’re spending time one on one in some fashion with the people you work with, I promise you don’t.
Second
Make people really think about what they’re doing and report it. Stand-ups have their place, but they loose effectiveness in big groups. I began having everyone report daily what they had accomplished, and what hey planned to accomplish the following day. This report was done at the end of each working day and was posted to a chat thread. In this form, teammates were more willing to be frank about issues they were facing, including not being tasked at all. It also gave us a history. I could easily identify people who had stalled out and weren’t making progress and needed help.
Third
We began tracking three separate org charts. First was our military org chart dictated by our manning, most organizations probably wouldn’t have this, but for us this dictated who supervised each member for evaluations and accountability. Second, we created an org chart based on the projects and teams people were on. This aligned more closely to member’s daily work. Third, an org chart based on member’s competencies. This gave us a visual picture of our strengths and weaknesses on a technical level. We could more easily justify training to meet projected needs or to fill gaps.
Gadwall is the latest iteration of all these things. Gadwall is my effort to turn these processes into automatic systems.
Government Service Organizations
I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to wait on government acquisitions to move on making important purchases. I also know how valuable a tool like Gadwall can be for military and first responders. For that reason, I offer Gadwall free for government service organizations with 10 or fewer members. If you happen to have more than 10 it doesn’t bother me if you make more than one account for sub teams.