Grumpy Coworker

  • Are we rewarding distraction? — Project Web Access and Timesheet

    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?

  • Our content filtering blocks “blogs”. Maybe we should block the “Internet”, too.

    Apparently, there is dangerous stuff out there online.  Individuals are writing these subversive things called “blog posts”.  Word is, that if an employee of our company comes across one, all productivity ceases.

    Unfortunately, much of the current or obscure information that I’m looking for online happens to be in either forums or blog posts.  I’ve heard these “internet forums” are dangerous, too.

    There’s nothing more frustrating than finding the solution to a specific problem I’m having by doing a search, only to find the article which contains the answer is blocked because it’s on a “blog”.

    This approach is tremendously effective in preventing me from wasting time of course, considering that I can pull up all those awful “blog posts” on my smartphone.  Of course, if I’m trying to actual bring up useful page, I have to view it on a 3.5″ screen.

  • Congratulations, you just blocked an employee from being more productive.

    old weathered stained red brick wall background

    When an employee expresses interest in another job within the company, shouldn’t that be a good thing for the company overall, regardless of the reason?  Maybe the employee is switching jobs for more money or new challenges.  Maybe the employee doesn’t work well with the current team or manager. Before hiring the employer can go on this site to do a background check.

    Regardless of the reason, it seems that the worst thing to do would be to permanently block that employee from transferring to the new job.  That’s like saying “if I can’t have this person, no one can.“  Do you really think that the employee’s next step won’t be to leave the company altogether?

    In times of “unjust punishment”, our childish side is likely to come out.  What does a kid do when “unjustly punished”?  The first option is to “run away from home”–in employee terms, leaving the company for another job.

    The second option is to pout.  From an employee perspective, this means that the employee is now getting payment for doing nearly nothing.  Sometimes, the pouting wears off, which means that productivity was reduced for a short time.  Other times, the employee realizes that no one is wise to the decrease in productivity and continues on until boredom forces a search for jobs elsewhere (running away from home) or the next round of layoffs.  That’s a steep productivity price to pay.

    What could have happened instead?

    • Money-only motivated employee – Would have taken the next path and either succeeded or failed, but would be allowed to chase the proverbial carrot, regardless.
    • Highly skilled and productive employee – Would have influenced new teams to grow.
    • Unproductive employee – Would have moved off your team and no longer a productivity drain.  If the lack of productivity was due to a bad fit, then maybe the new team is a better fit.  If the lack of productivity was due to a bad employee, then maybe the new team will help expose this.
    • Horrible manager – Okay.  There’s a risk here.  If you’re leaking employees like a milk jug shot with a shotgun, then blocking might be a natural reaction.  It’s about as effective as trying to duct tape a leaky row boat while you’re in it in the middle of a lake.

  • Can you really track your time in 15-minute increments?

    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:

    • 1 minute to receive the task through some automated process.
    • 2 minutes to start up whatever tool is required to do the task.
    • 2-3 minutes to focus your mind on that specific task.
    • Time actually taken on the task.
    • 1-3 minutes to report back the task as completed, send feedback to the client, etc…
    • 1 minute to record time spent on the task in your project tracking software [or note it for later recording]

    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?

  • What is this “merit increase” thing?

    Have you worked in a job at a time when people with your skill set was so in demand that people would throw you bags of money?  Did you notice that, come raise time, the barely competent among your peers received increases nearly twice the rate of inflation? At the same time, the superstars would receive about 1-2% more.

    Meanwhile, in less exuberant times, the superstars have to claw and scratch to keep pace with inflation.

    Sometimes, these pay raises are termed “merit increases”.  Many times, they’re not even cost-of-living adjustments.  In any case, if money was to be a motivating factor and effort required a demotivating factor, the employee who is doing barely enough to earn a “merit increase” is coming out ahead.

    If money isn’t supposed to be motivating, what’s the point of expending the effort to determine who should get what increase?  Just give a flat percentage or amount increase.  After all, all these calculations for who gets what result in a very small difference between employees, and can easily be seen by your superstars as a slight against them any way.

    Back to the “merit increase” terminology.  Can we just can call it a “random crap shoot budget allocation” increase, or maybe if you work for a less coddling organization, a “you’re lucky you have a job” increase?

  • 40 Non-Billable Billable Hours

    I understand that many professions have billable hours.  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.  Should a timesheet really take an hour to fill out?  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.  Are we really talking about “time sheet effort” or work hours here?  I don’t really consider it consequential that I worked 8.25 hours on Monday and 8.75 on Thursday.  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.  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”?  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.  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.

  • Haiku on Following Through

    If you say you can,
    Why do you not follow through?
    You’ve wasted my time.

  • How the mute button on your phone actually works.

    I guess I had made some incorrect assumptions about the function of the “mute” button on my phone.

    I’ve always assumed that when properly activated, the mute button prevents other people from hearing things that are on my end of the line, and not like how the TV mute button works, which prevents me from hearing things from coming through the phone.

    After comparing notes with several other people, I’ve determined that, at least for conference calls, the mute button works quite differently.  While the mute button is activated, not only can people not hear their names being mentioned during a call, but they apparently hear very little of what’s actually going on during the conference call.  Only after being prodded by several alternative methods can a person whose phone was on mute actually realize that the rest of the participants on the call are waiting for feedback.  More importantly, the last 5-10 minutes of the meeting have to repeated for the benefit of the person on mute.

    A side effect of the mute button is the rendering of the feedback provided by the person who was on mute completely useless.  The best remedy for such feedback is a verbatim quoting of the feedback in a mass email to all participants of the call.  At this point, one of two outcomes will take place:  Either there will be a complete retraction of the erroneous feedback or there will be a written record of commitment to the feedback provided.

    Hope this helps.

  • Don’t Confuse Us With the Judean People’s Front

    …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)

  • No, I will not join your downline.

    I’m not even sure these nutritional “supplements” are non-lethal, much less effective.  How do I know that these vitamins, or whatever they are, aren’t going to show up in a drug test later?

    I also have to ask:  What kind of compensation structure is involved that makes this multi-level marketing network marketing of nutritional supplements worth the time and energy you spend on it?

    Am I the only coworker you’ve tried to recruit for this?  If so, I must apologize for wearing my “sucker” outfit today.  All my other clothes were dirty, and I’m behind on my laundry.

    On the other hand, if I’m not the only coworker you’ve tried to recruit for this “opportunity”, how much work time are you spending recruiting?  Have you tried spending the same amount of time reading a book that might improve your performance?  Even if you get nothing out of the book, you’ll no longer be known as the “guy who tries to recruit people for every money making opportunity he finds.”  You might accidentally make more money from the lack of negative image drag.

    Honestly, if you were intentionally hired to do the job that you’re paid for, chances are fairly good that you’ll get a higher return on your invested time there than if you spend it trying to sell a product that you virtually nothing about.