How Manual is Your Project Management?
A truly brilliant engineer is lazy. Anything that can be automated will be automated. We try to never do anything twice. That’s why it pains me to see people still using by-hand techniques to gather data and generate reports. The inspiration behind 6th Sense Analytics was the automatic gathering and reporting of various data points.
Automatic
Did I make my point?
Anytime you do something boring and repetitive by hand, you’ve got two problems. The first is the opportunity to make a mistake. Boring tasks don’t get our full attention… small mistakes tend to occur. Then you have to do the same boring task… twice! Once with a mistake and again to try to get it right. (Assuming you get it right the second time!) This is ongoing tax you pay on all non-automated work.
The second, more serious problem, is the opportunity cost. You only get so many hours in a day… if you waste them pasting data into an Excel spreadsheet so you can generate a burn-up chart, that’s lost time that you could’ve spent doing work the computer can’t do for you.
If you’re stuck with your head in a spreadsheet, you’re not talking to your team. You’re not showing the product to your customers. You’re stuck on your computer. Isolated.
As I mentioned earlier, none of this is a one-time cost. It’s an ongoing tax you pay. Each time you perform a task by hand when it could be automated, you’re paying a small tax (or penalty) on the work you didn’t automate. These small payments add up until you reach the point not doing anything but “paying interest”. You’re working all day just to pay taxes. The small tasks eventually consume your day. At this point you’re completely in crisis management mode. It’s not a satisfying way to work, but it’s also terribly inefficient.
I encourage you to step back and look at a solution like 6th Sense Analytics. Let us generate your weekly reports, your burn-up charts, and your team wide status. We’ll tell you how good (or bad) your estimations are, how busy your source code repository is, and more. And you go do something that’s interesting and requires a human.
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How Manual is Your Project Management? ( 2008.16.06 2:46 pm )