The funny thing about any new methodology you might try is that the method seems to get all the credit in the end.

Here's a paraphrasing of  conversation with some co-workers. One of them is trying to convince his team to avoid a bumpy road traveled many times: tracking work hours against estimates. Yes, experienced content publishers, writers, editors of all kinds, I said tracking hours. Please don't turn the page yet.

You can switch to Kanban, GTD or hours tracking. It’s the fact that when facing a continuous, repeating problem that someone makes the choice to use an appropriate methodology. The people make the change. Yes, as a consequence the process was changed, too, BY PEOPLE. The people should get the credit.

In fact, the universe doesn't care at all what you do or what method you choose. Dare I say, it doesn't even care if you make anything.

On my last team, we made the decision to switch to Kanban. We gave it consideration and openly discussed the merits. We had some contentious discussions about whether it really is a “pull” strategy for example. And I think, for that problem, we chose well.

Plus, we had experienced writers who had used various systems comment on the various merits of those ideas. We stone-cold knew our problem. That’s a good place to start. An idea like tracking hours does not address the problem we had.

I might add our manager let us do it. He gave us the autonomy. That’s a rare commodity. It can be based on confidence-inspired trust or blind faith. Either way, we did it.