It’s easy to get bogged down in the problems. We see problems every day. A never ending stream of problems.
It’s hard to remember that those problems are always going to crop up and it’s better for us to focus on turning them into opportunities.
The Build server is broken again. Tests are failing in the report suite again. Joe submitted bad code, again.
We have an opportunity to improve the build server. Let’s take a look at what makes the report suite so hard to test, and see if we can fix that. Joe, let’s take as look at what you’re working on. It may be you have a module with a lot of inter-dependencies. It may be that you don’t understand what the module does as well as we thought. It may be the module isn’t well documented. Let’s fix that.
There are no magic bullets to improving productivity wholesale; but there are indicators. A good first step is to see where the problems are and turn those indicators into opportunities.