Tag: career

  • Use Research Time To Improve Your Team

    Use Research Time To Improve Your Team

    The schedule of every IT team I have worked with is full.  There is always a steady stream of tasks to be done and technical debt to address.  This makes it easy for a manager or team lead to keep the whole team working at 100% (or more) day in and day out.  The problem with this full steam ahead approach is that it does not provide time for research of new technologies and skill development.

    Popular Example

    Google made news many years ago when they scheduled a day a week for employees to research and develop skills.  Their instincts were tapped to the tune of 20% of their time.  This is not a small investment in employees and the company itself.  As it turns out, Google has been a pretty successful company.  You can see all sorts of products that have come out of that investment in their employees.  Just take a little time and browse the Google labs projects.  Many of these came out of that time allotted for research.

    This example is a good one for us to consider in scheduling projects and workloads.  Google is known for their innovation and skilled workers.  Some of this success comes from the employees that have been hired, but some of the credit goes to management.  This success did not come overnight but what if your organization is considered world-class a few years from now?

    Running The Numbers

    I am not sure a 20% investment of time is going to pass most companies.  However, what is the cost of 10% of their time?  Specifically, consider the typical IT worker does not work forty hours per week.  Fifty or more is common.  That is a 25% increase in “typical” work week hours.  Therefore, you can look at the hours worked Monday through Thursday, and that often meets the typical forty-hour workweek.  Providing a “research on Fridays” benefit would effectively be doing so with “free” hours.

    The cost of blocking out half the day on Friday for research or personal projects would be easy to absorb by any organization.  It used to be built into a lot of consulting companies.  They had a little thing called “bench time” that was non-billable work while waiting on a contract.  That has disappeared from many companies as they try to improve margins and reduce costs.  However, that has a price.  I worked at a company that used their bench time to create commercial software products.  They could have turned those consultants loose as soon as the billable jobs ended.  Instead, they turned them into resources to create another revenue stream.

    Making It Work

    A program like this is not to be taken lightly.  There is plenty of room for abuse and missing the point.  I have found that a few ground rules and some structure will go a long way.  The first step is to build in some accountability.  This has a danger of becoming micromanaged, but it is too valuable to ignore.

    The level of accountability I am talking about is regular status and setting goals.  Since this is research work, then the goals can be flexible.  However, there must be something for the employees to aim for.  This can be a challenge for those that are not self-starters.  Help them lay out a plan for what they want to accomplish.  Just make sure that you push them to lead the discussion and work on something that appeals to them.

    When you have a team that is working for you and has a “bonus” each week of doing something to advance their career everyone wins.  The employees will get better while becoming more loyal to your organization.  There is a danger of employees growing to the point where they leave to start their own companies, but I would argue that as good publicity.  When you have an environment that fosters success, you will have a steady stream of people that want to fill those holes.

  • Catching Up On Documentation and Overdue Tasks During a Lull

    Catching Up On Documentation and Overdue Tasks During a Lull

    Summer can be a frustrating time.  Much like the end of the year, there are a lot of vacations to work around, and your team varies from week to week.  That makes this an excellent time to take your vacation as well.  However, when you find yourself at work with limited staff or tasks waiting for people to return, there is an opportunity for catching up.  Those secondary and less important tasks that never seem to get done are excellent targets during these slow times.

    Getting Ahead

    One of the areas where it is easy to get behind is planning.  You know the Fall and wrap up of the year will be busy.  It almost always is.  Thus, this is a perfect time to look ahead to those hectic months and search for tasks you can start or even complete in this slow time.  It can be a time to lay down plans for the push and create documentation outlines where possible.  The work may not be such that it can be completed and off your plate.  However, any steps you take now will be less time to spend during that rush.  This is also a time to set things in motion if you are going to need vendor buy-in, customer sign-offs, or other administrative tasks that can often drag out the completion of a project.

    Catching Up On Overdue Tasks

    Planning takes some thought and forecasting.  Overdue tasks do not suffer from these restrictions.  You know what needs to be done.  Many of these tasks are the kind that languishes on your to-do list for weeks or months.  Why not remove those headaches and stress by knocking out some of your “productivity debt?”  When you take action your days will move along quickly and you will be thankful in the months ahead that you did.

  • Scaling Effectiveness – From Individual To Team

    Scaling Effectiveness – From Individual To Team

    Whether you are an employee, entrepreneur, contractor, or other, there comes the point where you need to scale your abilities.  We can only do so much on our own.  Thus, the need for extending effectiveness arises as soon as we try to do anything of substance.  The trick is in finding ways to train others to produce a quality that is close enough to ours.

    A Specialist Problem

    It goes without saying that this problem is one faced by specialists and those in skilled positions.  If your work is measured by time put in and the quality of your work is not a factor, then you scale by adding more resources.  Thus, we can build assembly lines of low-skilled labor and scale that to create millions of products.

    In the world of business and IT, there are very few low-skill positions (if any).  There are a few positions that are low-skilled that amount to data entry, but even those often require knowledge and experience to get the job done faster or better.  Therefore, to grow our business, we need to be able to develop our people.  We need to find ways to peel off some of the skilled labor we do, convert it to something that takes less skill, and pass it on to someone else.

    An Age Old Challenge

    Good News.  There is nothing new about needing to pass on skills to others or even the next generation.  However, we do seem to forget about that as something that requires our attention.  Our days are full, and we quickly fall into the trap of being “too busy” to think about how to delegate.  We need only look back a few decades to see industries driven by apprentice programs.  These were the first way we looked into scaling our skilled labor.

    Dissect How You Work

    The first step in delegating those things that only you can do is to examine your tasks closely.  There is often some form of “finishing touch” we put on our work while most of the functions could be done by anyone.  Even a software developer can have someone else write their code.  This procedure is quite a challenge as it amounts to putting your thoughts down in a document.  Nevertheless, it can be done, and the process is an excellent insight into delegating almost any responsibility.

    I recently wrote a tutorial on how to automate almost anything.  The beautiful thing is that this process is practically the reverse.  You have a method you follow as part of delivering a product or service.  We can dissect it by reducing it to the steps we take.  There will be steps that are hard to define like “think about the problem I am solving.”  That is ok for now.  We will parse that more another time.

    Once we have the first pass of steps, there are going to be concrete actions, and probably some “magic happens here” areas where we struggle to define our process.  Those specific actions are where we move next.

    Actions Reduce Skill Requirements

    Those concrete actions are where we can most quickly scale out our process.  The operations may require some level of skill.  However, a well-defined task can be done with more ability through practice.  We may be able to perform the work faster or at a higher quality than someone else.  Fear not, that is a temporary setback.  When we pull out that step and hand it off to someone else to do the work, we will also spend the time to review and assess their work.  This is an investment in making the worker better at the task.  At some point, we will be able to have our investment pay off in a job we can reliably hand off to another.

    Once we have a task or two pulled out to hand off, we can work on adding more to that list.  This allows us to scale as others do those tasks better (through training or experience) and as we take things off of our plate.

    Scaling Effectiveness Is That Simple

    So, we define the actions we take, find some we can hand off, and then do so.  We scale by repeating the process.  Is it that simple?  Yes, the procedure is not hard at all.  It is the definition of the tasks that is often a challenge.  Do not take my word for it.  Where are you invaluable to your job?  Spend some time to find at least one task you can hand to others and see how easy it is.