“Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.” – Thomas Gray

I’m starting to feel for Atlas. Sure, he was condemned to bear the heavens upon his shoulders, and I’m just trying to manage an IT workload. But the crushing feeling of no end in sight has to make us brothers in arms.

I’m quickly learning, there is no silver bullet in project management. Putting processes in place does not fix problems; it exposes them. If there is more work than workers, you’re going to fall behind. If you’re working on projects that are not fun to work on, there are no methodologies to fix boring.
However, leaving the lights off and ignoring the cockroaches running across the floor is not an option. Managers have to deal with the infestation. That is what we get paid to do.

Implementing Lean processes have exposed problems in our organizational structure and weaknesses in dealing with departments throughout our company. It would have been easy to blame the new system, and solve the problem by just getting rid of it. We could have just flipping the lights back off, but once you’ve seen the cockroaches, it’s tough to go back to business as usual.

It’s always hard to convince someone to implement anything that might lead to more work. Something that will make visible problems that no one even knew were problems.

There will be more stress and you’ll get some scars, but in the end, if you stick to your processes, your company will be better for it. And in times when we’re all trying to do more with less, you owe it to your team to deal with some stress if it can gain you some efficiency.