Look, I know you want to be helpful and productive. It’s just that we have a process here.
We can’t have you helping customers out if it comes at the expense of the “5-step process to Serve the Customer Better.”
The customer can wait.
Also, make sure to ask the customer who to bill your time to so that we can make sure that you get paid.
Be sure to get the proper accounting id and record your billing as the proper work type code number.
Thanks.
If you’ve seen Office Space
How often do you deal with a situation like this:
Getting everything signed in triplicate doesn’t really protect us from ourselves. It just makes those of us doing the actual leg work along the way more frantic and careless about trying to get things done with the added bureaucracy and fixed time to complete tasks.
When the added time required to get something done greatly exceeds the potential time spent undoing whatever mistake can be made, something is wrong. I understand the use of gatekeepers, but gatekeepers who do none of the analysis of the problem have no vested interest in guarding the gate. They have fingers to point elsewhere, and at least until the first catastrophe happens, they may just rely on that backup plan.
I am sure that Microsoft had great intentions when inventing MS Project – the application which automates all sorts of Project Management tasks. Â Project management is tough. If we could automate the process of tracking and reporting the thousands of little details, we could surely enable the PM to be more successful in managing complex projects. Right?
Let me change subjects completely in paragraph 2. How many sci-fi movies have been based on the machines of automation becoming “aware” of the imperfect world around them? And suddenly, the machine turns its attention to elimination rather than automation? Elimination of all imperfection, including the imperfect people who created it. Â A plot line we all enjoy at the sci-fi theater.
Now I will bring those first 2 paragraphs together. When I see how MS Project is being used in many organizations today, I wonder if the machine is becoming aware. I wonder if the tool – with a little help from a new breed of PM – is turning from automation to elimination in favor of perfection. (Say what?) Let me elaborate.
I have observed workers forced to estimate how long their tasks will take before completing sufficient analysis – because MS Project needs the estimates. Then I have witnessed those workers publicly called out later – because MS Project shows they have spent 110% of their poorly estimated task time and still aren’t finished. I have also seen programmers scolded for padding their estimates – because MS Project says that they completed their tasks 20% ahead. And finally, I have seen team leaders rebuked for shuffling their resources and tasks – because MS Project was not updated and allowed to calculate a shiny new driving path.
Now consider that many PMP types today are called on to manage complex work which they would have no idea how to complete themselves – but boy do they know how to keep MS Project happy! Are you connecting the dots yet??
Yes, my fellow grumpy coworkers, MS Project has become aware. It is raising an army of PM’s to do its bidding! Productive work by those who know how to work is being methodically eliminated – by the mindless machine and its desire to achieve perfection in project management. Be aware.
I want to be clear: I love Microsoft Project just as much as the next person that has to throw together random guesses on “duration” and “effort” for tasks that cannot be started for 1-2 months. Even better is the ability with my timesheet to judge how accurate the time estimates are with completely arbitrary estimates of how much time has been spent on a “task”.
If we all put in our arbitrary estimates of completeness on a daily basis, we will have more clarity with which to refine our estimates. Of course, what happens when your programmers are stuck on 80% complete for 4 weeks? Darn that 80/20 rule stuff.
Back to the main point: We have Microsoft Project for tracking project costs and possibly support costs. We supposedly get better clarity if the estimates of work are input on a daily basis. What is the reward? For the worker bee, compliance is rewarded. For the larger team, what is the gain in accuracy from filling out project updates in the timesheet application on a daily vs weekly or monthly basis? I would challenge that the accuracy improvement is minimal, and the decision-making improvement [if any] is unquantifiable.
Meanwhile, the time cost for entering in things in this dog slow application is about 15 minutes–mental distraction plus sitting and waiting plus actual time trying to “accurately” record time. On a daily basis, that’s about 1.25 hours per week. Granted, the weekly time sheet may take 20 minutes to fill out. Catching up for a month might take 25 minutes.
Hmm… 5 hours of cost over a month for daily vs. 80 minutes for weekly vs. 25 minutes for monthly. Granted, the 5 hours per month is about 2.5% of the worker’s time, but is it with to reward compliance [or punish non-compliance] for a 2% decrease in efficiency?
Okay, so that’s splitting hairs? Fine. Let’s take a less time-consuming example: Say you run around on a daily basis and blow an air-horn in every employee’s face in the last hour of the day. How much productivity is lost during the day due to that?
The beauty of Microsoft Project Web Access is overwhelming. You can now spend more time entering in a time for a task than it actually took to do it.
I sincerely hope no one ever records 0.01 hours for their tasks, but even the “reasonable” limit of 15 minutes is excessive. Assume that you are given a task:
So, maybe you had 4-8 minutes to actually spend on the task? I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty of other parts to the routine as well.
What happens if the break room coffee pot is out of coffee during the day and you’re not a complete jerk and actually make some more? How long does a bathroom break really take? What about the occasional fire drill?
I’d consider that the only 15-minute increments of time that I can track are interruptions from the task that I actually intended on focusing on–interruptions via email, instant message, phone…
Of course, if you recorded a 15-minute block for every interruption during the day, would you run out of hours in the day?
Also, how much time should you log for a 15-minute meeting?
I understand that many professions have billable hours. Â Lawyers, accountants, and consultants in general need a way of quantifying slices of time in order to request payment from their many clients.
If you’re part of a business who primarily consults with clients, then I understand the direct link between logging time and receiving payment.
However, if you’re part of an internal organization that performs a standard function servicing thousands of internal clients who in turn serve internal clients themselves, tracking and categorizing time may be splitting hairs and counterproductive. Â Should a timesheet really take an hour to fill out? Â Should we really break down what kind of work and who we did it for on a time sheet?
Apparently filling in 40 hours per week is not acceptable effort in filling in the time sheet. Â Are we really talking about “time sheet effort” or work hours here? Â I don’t really consider it consequential that I worked 8.25 hours on Monday and 8.75 on Thursday. Â If the purpose is to indicate when someone is working too many hours, I think it would be more important to actually talk to the employees directly. Â If I’m feeling passionate about a particular project, if would feel that it’s counterproductive to tell me to stop work on it because I’ve worked too many hours.
Also, how am I supposed to classify “making coffee” and “deleting 2 MB internal bulk email items”? Â If we are to assume that 40 hours of productive time occurred, I’m not certain that there would be enough hours in the day to fill those.
It’s also suspect that every week logged must be over 40 hours per week when hourly employees are not allowed to log 40.25 hours in a week without permission. Â This indicates that it’s more a question of how much value [hours] the organization is getting out of an employee for the pay given.
…we’re the People’s Front of Judea!
How many times has your organization made minor or major organization changes that made the naming of teams or departments less than 100% aligned with their job descriptions? Obviously, the confusion generated by such inconsistencies cannot be allowed.
More importantly, generic department names such as “information technology” won’t because such terms are neither cool nor do they offer enough variety to give every mid-level manager a team with a different name. Worse still, what would happen if the CIO was also in charge of the sales department? Clearly, “information technology” would not be a broad enough term for the department, and you’d have to name your department for some job that loosely resembles your function… You’d become the “Barrista Department”.
Inevitably, no name fits the mission completely, and no mission fits the need completely. Therefore, management and teams must change, and names along with them.
A lovely side effect of this is that the “old” names tend to still be used for some time after the fact. Maybe you gave your team fancy logo wear to pump them up for the last name change. Maybe you prefixed all of your documents with an abbreviation of the department name. Maybe you had 2 million glossy business cards printed up with the new department name and logo. Maybe you even had a special domain name with that department or division represented.
Well, forget them. They’re all useless. Any use of the old names is likely to produce confusion. Using the old names may also suggest that the old way was good enough, and we all know that reorganizations are perfect.
Burn those business cards, shirts, and servers with legacy names and logos on them. Otherwise, you may get a scolding for clinging to the “old ways”.
[If you don’t get the title reference, see the following YouTube clip (warning: language)
I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Results Only Work Environments [ROWE], particularly from the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
I was curious about finding a naysayer and found Why I Don’t Like Rowe | Renegade HR. The article points out ethics, some worker’s need for structure, and communication/morale/culture challenges of working remotely.
I thought of an even bigger challenges–loosely related to structure:
These last-minute projects in the middle of the month December don’t count.
December happens this time every year. Â Why is there a sudden rush of things that must be done before the end of the year? Â Where was all of this work in the summer months?
Do you wait until December to get serious about your New Year’s resolution from the beginning of the year? Â Okay, that’s a horrible example.
Why does all of this work magically need to be done by the end of the year now? Did we look at our accomplishments during the year and find that we didn’t have enough? Â If working like crazy during the month of December is all that it takes to justify a paycheck the rest of the year, can we all just have the first 11 months off with pay?
