Grumpy Coworker

Category: Productivity

  • Crash the Project Plan

    Crash Closed
    Image by Fabio.com.ar via Flickr

    Why in the world would you want to “crash” a project plan? The very use of the word “crash” seems to purvey a sense of doom.

    If you’re not familiar with the “crashing” process, it involves taking a current project plan’s Gantt chart and looking for opportunities to make the chart predict an earlier completion date.

    In some cases, this is a completely legitimate practice.  If you have tasks that can be done at the same time by two different people or tasks that are erroneously dependent upon each other, you can possibly shorten the timeline by crashing.

    However, I’ve also observed the practice of having an already promised date set for a project, and then having your project managers actually figure out how long it will actually take. When realistic expectations are inevitably longer than promised, the discrepancy will either be:

    1. Allowed to slip for the time being if comfortably close to the original promised date.
    2. Immediately scrutinized for tasks that take “too long”.  (Build a highway: 1 year…  Change that to 2 days.)

    Ultimately, there will be a process of crashing either at the start of the project or in the middle of the project. Unfortunately, response to reality taking longer than promised is often to redefine what reality should be instead of actually trying to accept reality.

    The end result becomes a crashing of the project instead of the project plan.

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  • Be Open to Change!

    Amazon Affiliate Link

    “The only constant is change.”

    “Be open to change.”

    “Embrace change.”

    For those who work in small businesses or startups, these mantras probably aren’t necessary. When you’re breathing constant change, you don’t have to be reminded that it exists.

    No, the only people that have to be reminded that “change happens” are those who work for large, slow moving organizations, such as large corporations and government agencies. Many of us have actually stuck with these organizations, despite all the bureaucracy, specifically because change is such a rarity.

    Stop telling us safety seeking employees about this whole change thing. Stop giving us copies of Who Moved My Cheese? If we truly embraced change, we probably wouldn’t suffer the high degree of bureaucracy in favor of the safety of the large organization.

  • The Priority Queue, or Why the Low Priority Tasks Don’t Exist

    A queue is wonderful thing… the next person in line gets the next available worker.

    However, in many situations, the first person in line shouldn’t always be serviced first, for example, in an emergency room: You can’t leave a person having a blow-out heart attack in the third place in line behind a broken arm and someone who has a rash on his foot.

    In these cases, you create a priority queue, and process first-come, first-serve for all concerns of like priority…  Your priority tiers in the emergency room could be something like: immediately life-threatening, potentially life-threatening or capable of resulting in permanent injury, all the way down to mild irritation [the symptom or the patient].

    In a strict priority queue, if there are enough immediately life-threatening emergencies, the people with broken arms and mild irritations will not receive attention until the life-threatening emergencies go away.  If the hospital is chronically understaffed, those low priority issues will never receive any attention. In the middle of the spectrum are those whose problems aren’t immediately life-threatening but will become so if enough time goes by.

    This is not to mention that at some point between serious issues and irritation is lunch for the hospital staff.

    There comes a point where either the low priority and medium priority patients need to be shipped to another hospital unless you want a couple of them to become life-threatening and the rest to cause a riot in your hospital, in which the overworked hospital staff may be tempted to participate.

    Just admit to the mild irritations that they’re going to have to go elsewhere to be treated–unless they have extenuating circumstances that make them higher priority than your original assessment.

     

  • Defeating the Clockwatching Game

    Your rivals and managers in the office are playing a clockwatching game with you. Among their tools are:

    • Email timestamps.
    • Parking lot spots.
    • People witnessing you walking in and walking out with your bags.
    • Instant messages peppered through lunch hours.
    • Away status on instant messenger.
    • Online status on instant messenger.

    These things cannot be used in your favor so much as having interference run against them.

    • Schedule Outlook Messages
    • Park in the farthest space available, always.
    • Keep a coffee mug in your car, and fill it up on a different floor. Walk in with you laptop powered up or a keep a spare notebook in your car and walk in with that.
    • Hook up your smartphone to an instant messaging client that works with your instant messenger.

    By the way, if you’re using this to slack off, your lack of productivity will ultimately be found out, you scoundrel.

  • The Social Bonds of a Team

    I’m sure that, somewhere out there, some popular business wisdom says that people get stagnant when they stay in the same core group too long. Maybe they’re supposed to start failing to come up with new ideas because they are stuck in the mode of groupthink. Maybe they’re too comfortable and complacent. Maybe well-bonded teams are supposedly full of self-promotion and cronyism.

    There must be some business wisdom that says that, because it seems that reorganizations often target the cohesive teams as non-productive.

    Here’s a different perspective: Teams are families. They have black sheep and dysfunctional members. However, they also find a way to survive despite the individual failings of each team member that would otherwise be somewhat insurmountable. Teams have an implicit loyalty and trust that bypasses the initial trust evaluation phase that occurs with a new relationship.

    What if teams function as an extension of the neural networks that shape the individual members of the team? Just as a person who takes up tennis one year, then switches to piano, then cooking,  never becomes good at anything, teams that never build a cohesive unit never become good at anything.

    Of course, reorganization itself doesn’t have to permanently break down team cohesiveness. New teams can form, just like people join new families. The danger occurs in the perpetual reorganization cycle, especially when team members have no real input about their interests. Such cycles have the same effect on team building that moving a child from foster home to foster home has on trust. Eventually, people just assume that any bonding effort will be wasted and quit bothering to try.

  • Bookmarked:

    6 common work habits that sabotage your productivity

    Glad to see status meetings on this list.

    Overall, compulsive activities and “keeping up appearances” activities are not very productive, and Lifehacker points the common ones out in the above article.

  • Stupid Questions are the Important Questions

    Say you’re sitting in a meeting, and a ridiculously stupid question pops into your head. You should ask the question.

    I’m not talking about a stupid question that would demonstrate your complete ignorance about some key concept that’s being discussed; however, you better ask that question, too–the consequences will be less painful if you ask the question before you completely crash and burn.

    Let’s get back to the stupid question in the back of your mind, though. There is probably a reason it popped up. Your subconscious probably heard two people trying to make 2+2=5.75 or something.

    This nagging thought in the back of your mind is like hearing what sounds vaguely like a choking sound coming from another room. It may be nothing, but it’s now your responsibility to check it out. It will be on your conscience if something goes horribly wrong.

  • The Producers: Corporate Edition

    For those who haven’t seen The Producers (affiliate link), the premise is two producers who get the idea to oversell shares of a horrible play [hundreds of times over], so that they can make off with the surplus when the play ultimately flops early. Unfortunately, the play is smashing success and the producers are now on the hook for paying out many times the actual profits of the show.

    It seems like support resource planning often goes this way–departments budget and sell their services under the assumption of a best case scenario [virtually nothing goes wrong]. Ultimately, the first outage of services begets additional outages of services, and selling that same support resource to 250 people becomes a recipe for disaster.

  • Types of Meetings

    Reposted with Permission from YouMightBe.com

    Meeting before the meeting – A select group of people, usually from the same team, decide what the “correct outcome” of the main meeting is supposed to be. When the main meeting comes, the co-conspirators stick to their guns about what must be done.

    Meeting after the meeting – Often, the people who were run over by the pre-meeting decision will have a meeting afterward to discuss what just hit them. Especially true when the main meeting involved a large vendor.

    Meeting just to make sure we keep having this meeting – An agenda-less meeting that occurs during the only available weekly time slot on the calendars of all participants, so everyone shows up and fakes it through the meeting aimlessly until the time is up.

    The mutually ignored meeting – Sometimes coincides with the “meeting just to make sure we keep having this meeting.”  Usually, however, this meeting has a more organized structure.  Everyone participates in the meeting by speaking in turn, yet no one actually hears anything that the other participants are saying.  Often coincides with the “project status meeting”.

    Pep Rally Meeting – These meetings are supposed to replicate the glory days of the tech boom, complete with an enthusiastic leader leading the cheering.  These can be fun if the overall culture of the company fits.  They can also be the source of YouTube videos.

    Sub-Meeting – A complete side discussion that starts by distracting major participants in the main meeting, and eventually overtakes the main meeting purpose, either by acoustics or by importance.

    “Party” Meeting – This may be a special occasion to recognize a milestone birthday, anniversary, retirement, etc., and is often characterized by a lot of standing around in odd clusters of people.  People from each of these clusters take turns migrating to the focus of the party to say a good word, and then drift back to their clusters or to their desks.  Social aptitude generally determines how long a person has to wait to for a turn.

    Project “status” meeting – A regular project “update” meeting where everyone gives an “everything’s okay” status, regardless of what part of the project is crashing and burning.

    Virtual Meeting – A remote meeting that everyone dials into and immediately mutes, proceeding to spent their time more productively, such as by watching Sportscenter or playing ping-pong.

    Meeting to teach someone how to run a meeting – This is generally a status-type meeting where a less-experienced team member learns how to start a meeting, stick to an agenda, and write down and assign “action items”.

  • How Not to Leave a Phone Message

    Many of us phone novices are guilty of this…  Do not leave your phone message like this:

    My name is [x] with [y]

    Paragraph 1

    Paragraph 2

    Paragraph 3

    Paragraph 4

    Paragraph 5

    … two minutes later …

    My number is [blur]

    My cell number is [blur]

    My name is [x]

    I have to replay/navigate to the end of the message to get the phone number. With cell phone message functionality this works okay, however, I don’t have my voicemail shortcuts memorized, so I’m stuck re-listening to the whole message.

    Also, the only thing you repeated was your name. That’s moderately useful, but your contact info is far more important. If I don’t have that, remembering what your name is is useless.

    I would personally prefer a script like this:

    Hi, my name is [x] with [y].

    My number is [spoken while you write it down].

    My cell number is [spoken while you write it down].

    I’m calling about [n].  [Maybe a second sentence goes here].

    Again, my name is [x] with [y].

    My number is [spoken while you write it down].

    My cell number is [spoken while you write it down].

    Please don’t try to solve the issues you’re calling about on the message. There’d be no reason to call in that case.