When was the last time you saw anyone sitting back in his chair, feet up on the desk, engaged in the old-fashioned practice of thinking? Ever since organizations began downsizing and re-engineering a decade ago, we've become so frantically overscheduled that we don't even stop to ask why we're doing whatever it is that keeps us so busy. Consequently, IT managers can dramatically improve a team's productivity simply by helping its members manage their time.

My colleague Tom DeMarco has just written a book, Slack: Creating Room in Your Company for Profits and Growth (Broadway Books, 2001), that proposes the antithesis of the common "death march" project environment: deliberately building slack into a project schedule to provide flexibility for coping with unanticipated problems and opportunities. Indeed, he suggests incorporating slack into the IT head count to avoid the inefficiencies resulting from overcommitted workers juggling multiple assignments on multiple projects.

I fear DeMarco has an uphill battle convincing modern corporations that deliberately planned slack is a good thing. Meanwhile, managers can use traditional ideas from Stephen R. Covey's First Things First Every Day (Simon & Schuster, 1997). Covey recommends prioritizing tasks on a two-dimensional grid whose axes are "urgency" and "importance." He divides the grid into four quadrants: Q1 (high importance, high urgency) contains the "heart attack" tasks; Q2 (high importance, low urgency) includes things such as regular exercise to prevent a heart attack; Q3 (low importance, high urgency) contains office interruptions, e-mail and phone calls; and Q4 (low importance, low urgency) consists of time wasters.

We've become so efficient during the past decade that we've eliminated most Q4 activities during the working day; we save them for the evening, when we relax with TV sitcoms and a glass of wine. But the typical working day is filled with Q3 activities. Q1 activities can't be ignored because ignoring a heart attack means death or its corporate equivalent: bankruptcy or project failure. But nobody champions the Q2 activities of planning, thinking and analyzing, since such activities appear to be idle time and are often frowned upon.

How extensive are the Q3 interruptions? An article in The Nando Times reported that each day, a typical dot-com marketing director receives 80 to 100 e-mails, 100 to 150 phone calls, 20 to 25 voice mails and two or three memos and has "face-time" meetings with 10 to 12 people. That's almost 300 interruptions per day; assuming a 10-hour day, with no lunch breaks, that's one interruption every two minutes. I marvel at the "productivity" of someone who copes with such an onslaught -- but is there any time left for old-fashioned thinking and planning?

IT project teams often have a similar work environment, and managers can help by teaching team members to differentiate between urgency and importance. For example, filtering e-mail is a good discipline, since e-mail is the predominant form of communication in today's high-tech world. I keep four folders in my e-mail program, labeled Q1 to Q4. I've gradually accumulated almost 500 "filters" that automatically assign incoming mail to one of these folders. Not only does most junk mail disappear, but e-mail from strangers and busybodies usually ends up in the Q3 or Q4 folder and less than 20% ends up in the Q1 folder demanding immediate attention.

Managers can also help team members learn to plan their week in advance. Ideally, we would follow DeMarco's advice and schedule some slack time during the week. We might even encourage team members to schedule time to put their feet up on the desk and think about what they're doing. But if nothing else, we can encourage our developers to ensure that Q2 items are consciously allocated the time they need, rather than being pushed aside by the immediate pressure of a Q3 interruption.

It sounds like common sense, but as the humorist Will Rogers used to say, "Common sense isn't common."

» posted by ITworld staff

Computerworld

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