Team management to get something streamlined

Question

I am unofficially given an opportunity to lead a very strong technical team.

We work in 24*7 shifts there. We have shift handover happening twice a day.

Currently we are just preparing a set of tables with a few columns to enter details like any open issues or tickets and their update + future tasks for the resource person coming in to the shift.

Personally I think updating the sheet is a hot mess and things get untidy very soon. I tried sending a couple of emails to members where they forgot to remove a completed task from handover like weeks old or just randomly entering new data which gives me anxiety. Just looking at how untidy things are is probably why the team seems bit lame here.

How should I approach the team when I do not get any real engagement, or how to get some spark to get everyone on track so that they feel excited as well as important in updating the handover nicely?

By shift I mean we have 6 people working 8 AM to 8 PM ET as 1st shift and 8PM to 8 AM ET as 2nd shift. We have handover updated at these 2 times during a call as well as on a Sharepoint tracker where things are all hot mess. Out of 6 only one would be primary every week who is responsible for updating sheet. Next week it's the next person and so on.

By unofficial I mean an opportunity given to lead internal team which I have been working with past 4 years. This opportunity given based on half a dozen projects lead by me, but they did not involve working with people on the same team. As of now this authority does not hold any vital decisive calls which impacts a resource like annual review etc.

Others see me as someone question would be hard to answer because there may be some who will agree while other may be on a different page. I can send emails and loop my higher manager for push to make everyone follow a process which might work but I don't want to take that route as would not showcase me as a future leader. I want to understand what is stopping them and how can we overcome this as a team.

Please provide suggestions for how to approach this situation!

Answer 1

It would help to know the nature of your team's work, and what kind of tickets you work on. Handing over work in progress to a different person works reasonably well if the task is shoveling sand from one heap to another, but not really for intellectual tasks where the majority of the effort is in understanding the problem and finding a solution.

That said, if you have a more-or-less continuous stream of moderately small-sized tickets, a kanban approach may work best, supported by some ticketing system that allows team members to pick work items, make notes, update their status etc. Going through a central person is a major bottleneck.

Handover (as in passing unfinished items to the next person or shift) should only be necessary when items can not be finished within one worker's shift and are very time-critical, so can't wait until they return to work next day. Even then, you need to realize that handing over development or problem analysis work incurs immense overhead and should be avoided as much as possible.

If your team members can pick the next work item or ticket based on a reasonable estimation of time needed and don't have to strictly follow some arbitrary ordering (such as FIFO or highest prio first) they may be able to avoid handover most of the time except when their estimation turns out to be much too low initially.

As per Ashok's comment, 12 hour shifts seem extremely unusual, what country is this? Do they still allow slave labor? Most of the world has come to the conclusion that around 8 hours per day is the maximum work time for mentally demanding tasks (sadly, hospital doctors and nurses often have to work much longer shifts, but these are structured somewhat differently.) After a 12 hours work day, I would be about as excited about handing over work in a stressful conference call as I would be about sorting a basket of stinky football player socks - expecting engagement from the team seems a little out of place here.