This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum How to help a randomized team:

“My team is trying to transition from being purely an integration and maintance team into having real customers with problems, feature requests, complaints, etc. There is a customer support organization but they’re often slow and don’t understand enough about the details to be efficient in exchange information between us and the customer.

The primary problem now is we’re drowning – we have figured out how to simultaneously deal with the ongoing maintance work, while also doing planning and customer work for the next major version. The team is frustrated, decisions are slow and everyone is losing patience. In short, we feel randomized and I don’t know what to do to stop it.

Someone in my org suggested having a escalation response team or process to help shield my team from unnecessary interruption, but I don’t know enough about that to know if it’s right or how to put it into place.”

– Signed, Mr. Crispy (Burning at both ends)