So you get people performing their jobs by rote, servicing their interrupts in the best way they know how, doing as little as possible, doing enough to get by. They are not thinking of ways to improve. They are not thinking ways to help others. They are not thinking of ways to innovate. They are thinking, "How the heck can I get out from under this mountain of work?" It's horrible for them, for the product, and for everyone they encounter.
When you ask people to work at 100 percent utilization, you get much less work out of them than when you plan for them to perform roughly six hours of technical work a day. People need time to read email, go to the occasional meeting, take bio breaks, have spirited discussions about the architecture or the coffee or something else. But if you plan for a good chunk of work in the morning and a couple of good chunks of work in the afternoon and keep the meetings to a minimum, technical people have done their fair share of work.
If you work in a meeting-happy organization, you can't plan on six hours of technical work; you have to plan on less. You're wasting people's time with meetings.
But no matter what, if you plan on 100 percent utilization, you get much less done in the organization, you create a terrible environment for work, and, you create an environment of no innovation. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for success does it?
Agile and Lean Make the Myth Transparent
Agile and lean don’t make 100 percent utilization go away; they make the myth transparent. By making sure that all the work goes into a backlog, they help management and the teams see what everyone is supposed to be working on and how impossible that is. That’s the good news.
Once everyone can visualize the work, you can decide what to do about it. Maybe some of the work is really part of a roadmap, not part of this iteration’s work. Maybe some of the work is part of another project that should be postponed for another iteration. That’s great—that’s managing the project portfolio. Maybe some of the work should be done by someone, but not by this team. That’s great—that’s an impediment that a manager of some stripe needs to manage.
No matter what you do, you can’t do anything until you see the work. As long as you visualize the work in its entirety, you can manage it.
Remember, no one can do anything if you are 100 percent utilized. If you want to provide full value for your organization, you need to be “utilized” at about 50 to 60 percent. Because a mind, any mind, is a terrible thing to waste.
Read all of Johanna's Management Myths here:
- The Myth of 100% Utilization
- Only the 'Expert' Can Perform This Work
- We Must Treat Everyone the Same Way
- I Don't Need One-on-Ones
- We Must Have an Objective Ranking System
- I Can Save Everyone
- I Am Too Valuable to Take a Vacation
- I Can Still Do Significant Technical Work
- We Have No Time for Training
- I Can Measure the Work by the Time People Spend at Work
- The Team Needs a Cheerleader!
- I Must Promote the Best Technical Person to Be a Manager
- I Must Never Admit My Mistakes
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About the author
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development. She helps them recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments. Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. She is the technical editor for Agile Connection and the author of these books:
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
Johanna is working on a book about agile program management. She writes columns for Stickyminds.com and projectmanagementcom and blogs on her website, jrothman.com, as well on createadaptablelife.com.
User Comments
Thanks for the article, Johanna. I added a link to a short post of mine that tells of a personal experience of mine, from a company where thinking wasn't really allowed.
At AYE this year, a group of us discussed one aspect of the challenges of multitasking. One of us had a manager who understood that full utilization is not a valuable goal in itself. Because she understood this, she was OK with one of the UX experts not being fully utilized. She wanted this person to be available on short notice when a need for her skills turned up. However, this turned out to be a major challenge for the UX expert, who had a hard time accepting that she wasn't "fully utilized" at all times.
Goes to show that this myth is hard to get at for many reasons. Thanks again for writing about it. /Tobias.
Tobias, your link is missing. Please add it!
Thanks Johanna. It's actually there, just hiding under my name in the comment above. Here it is again in plan text: http://www.tobiasfors.se/?p=705
Johanna,
I completely agree! Striving for 100% utilization is counter-productive, and you most certainly won’t get the innovation that companies profess that they want. I wrote something on similar lines last year in an article, “The Unintended Consequences of Common Productivity Tactics” at: http://www.developer.com/mgmt/it-workshop-the-unintended-consequences-of...
I didn’t address the utilization concern or the hit that innovation takes when people are over-utilized (this was about common tactics to “boost” productivity, including multi-tasking), but we do need to shift thinking away from outputs to outcomes.
David, I love the reference to Star Trek, and I love the article. I could swear you and I had the same experiences!
I agree, focusing on outcomes is what we want. Why should anyone care how we get there?
I like the article... once I faced a similar problem.
I do more software architecture than programming, and once I was ask to make sure that my team was being well utilized because "by the time they put on the keyboard surely it does not look like" (it was said with a bit of sarcasm).
The conversation when something like this:
- So programmers are fully used only by the time that they are banging keys?
- Well... isn't that what you guys do?
- So like carpenters, they are fully use only when they have a hammer in their hands?
- And equally replaceable as well...
- So you will fire a carpenter that has a screwdriver in their hands because is your understanding that carpenters only use hammers?
- ...
- You see? The keyboard is only one of the many tools needed to write a program. And when you don't see my team banging keys is because they are working for the project with some other tool.
- I don't know about that, but I want my project on time!
- That is my job, and it will be,
And it was. The quality was higher than expected (mostly because previous bad experiences with other teams), and because of this I gained this person trust by the end of the project. The 100% utilization was never an issue again, and we worked together on other projects just fine. There is a part of us that needs to learn to speak up, specially to difficult people.
I love it. Maybe when I'm done with the myth series, I'll do a series on how to speak up. Part of the myth series is how to talk up, though.
That we are humans and not machines.
If you sit more than 30 min your small blood veins will be cut off from main circulation, making 50 to 80% of the insulin useless. My boss has diabetes, when I told him about that he understood why I exercise so much and he made a plan for everyone. The result was a higher productivity of 40%.
And if you run into a Manager like this again ask him how many monitors his developers have. A secound time-saving monitor increases productivity by 25% and amortises within one day.
I bought myself a second monitor a few years ago, mostly to manage eyestrain. (Oh these old eyes :-) And, I drink enough water to have to get up every hour at a minimum. I didn't realize I should increase that. Maybe that's why the Pomodoro technique is so useful.
Kudos to everyone for exercising more!
Actually this effect in your blood is the reason why people who sit for a long time lose their attention. The emerging discrepancies between the nutrition the brain needs and what the body can provide create a gap which then rises into a failure to concentrate. One has to invest some time working with your body so the body can provide what the brain needs to work. This way the people are even less "utilized" than people who just sit and work, but the outcome equals to 100% or even higher than if they just sit.
On youtube you can find simple workouts for your face by Jack Lalanne, they are a good start. Change your habits and make sure you take a deep breath every 10 minutes and stand up every 20 minutes. One little walk when having lunch and every 2 hours a little workout of 3 to 5 minutes. Or get a secound working place with a standing desk or like many freelancers now with a treadmill. You will very soon find out how these very little wastes of time increase your productivity. Thanks for your link to the Pomodoro technique, I will have a closer look at it.
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