I hate project management. It's fiddly, pointless "work about work" nobody dreams of doing when they're young. And yet, in software, you'd better get it right, unless blown deadlines, capital incineration, and pissed-off teams are your thing.

I've heard bathrooms are a good proxy for whether a McDonald's franchise is well-run. The software team analog: the backlog.

Good:

• One list
• What's in the list is what people are working on

Bad:

• Multiple lists: the "main list", the "super-high priority bugs" list, the "stuff I actually need to do, to get promoted" list, and a not-written-anyhwere "stuff my manager told me to do that isn't tracked anywhere" list
• "We spend 80% of our time working off the backlog, and 20% on the off-books stuff the sales team urgently needs to win next quarter's deals"
• Two people working on a task at the same time, because neither one marked it "started"
• Tasks that keep carrying over from one planning period to the next
• Meetings where work is discussed that never makes it into the list
• Items at the top of the list that get skipped because "they aren't important"

It's amazing how cathartic it can be, when faced with a huge chaotic mess of competiting priorities, to write them all down, realize they can't all get done, and force choices about what is actually going to get done. And then, once that happens, ensure every tradeoff is framed in terms of what gets dropped, if new work gets added to the top.