Redirecting Lost Time — Towards Impact
My previous post focused on engineers taking the time to understand the time related to their personal work patterns. However, in today's environments we're heavily multitasking. I hear this over and over again from engineers. Rarely is it the case that they're working on a single project.
Instead, they contribute to many efforts. And their time is often interrupted across them. It seems to be a side effect of today's economic climate that teams are understaffed and overloaded. Managers and project managers seem to take pride in the fact that they're operating "lean and mean" within their teams. In small teams and start-up environments this almost seems to be the modus operandi.
Clearly I'm not implying that all of these cases are bad. In fact, economics should come into play within teams. And the assumption that there is one bit of focused work for every engineer is clearly flawed. However, there is another factor involved here. These teams not only think they're operating quickly and frenetically, but they also think they're operating efficiently and effectively as well. I would respectfully challenge the latter points.
In their breakthrough work Peopleware (and I've quoted from it more than once in this blog) Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister explored the impact that multitasking has on knowledge workers (your) productivity. They spoke in terms of 20% productivity hits for each additional project that was added to an engineer or team of engineers. Each time you switch your focus from one project activity to another, you perform a context switch. Depending on how often you switch and the durations of the switches, you'll potentially lose 20% of your time per additional project.
In our early experiences, we've seen many teams that average about 60% Active Time within a week. Given a 40 hour work week (I know, who does that nowadays) that means that a typical engineer is coding for 24 hours. Using the Peopleware assumptions, if we now introduce a three-project multitasking scenario on that engineer, they will lose 40% of that time to task switching, bringing their Active Time coding down to 15 hours.
6th Sense Analytics™ data won't necessarily help the engineer avoid multitasking. As I said, it seems to be a pervasive practice. However, you will be able to capture and illustrate what multitasking is actually doing to your personal productivity within your team. The data will lead you to impact conclusions that you can use to adjust your own work patterns, but also communicate to your leaders adjustments they might want to make at a project level to improve overall efficiency.
This broad level of project impact analysis and partnership with your leaders is a change for most developers. It requires a bit of extra effort to look across your projects. It takes a bit of courage to go out on a limb and challenge current project and work practices. But in this case, you're using data and real impacts to drive the discussion towards productivity improvements. I think most managers will get that.
There's another broader view that you can take with this information. Often in heavily multitasking environments, little thought is put into the priority of the work. It's more important to react to the moment and often team members can be focusing in the wrong areas or doing things in the wrong order from a high level efficiency perspective. I'll give you an example.
Your manager tells you that Project x is your highest priority, Project y is next and Project z gets the remainder of time. They also specifically tell the team to spend at least 50% of their overall time on Project x. This sort of time balance is important to meet project commitments for the three projects. Well that's all well and good, but how well do you and the team actually meet this direction?
In this case, you can actually review your own data and then step up to look across the project as well. Again, remembering that you want to partner with leadership to make a broader impact, you can provide workflow and balance guidance across your team.
Quite often teams think they're supporting overall project multitasking priority properly, but when you look at the data, the real driving factor might be the loudest customer or the first task to hit you in the morning. No wonder it's so hard to effectively multitask and meet project goals.
So to wrap up this blog series, I hope I've motivated you to start really analyzing and understanding your personal and project level time. Step out there and really make adjustments on what you see. Your projects will love you for it. And your career might get a boost as well. Happy hunting!
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