Does your organization have more projects happening than you have people to work on them? Many businesses today rely on multitasking, which really means assigning people to multiple projects, to keep up with the volume of new requests and initiatives. But does this approach actually lead to more projects being completed? Usually it is quite the opposite, as context switching, schedule conflicts, and distractions lead to delays and poor quality -- and huge declines in productivity. A developer trying to juggle four projects could easily lose 50% of the day bouncing among them.
How did we get into this situation?
Our natural tendency is to want to say “Yes” when asked to take on new work. In fact, in some cultures, it is considered rude or insubordinate to say “No” to a request. Further, projects are often reviewed and approved in isolation, without considering what is already being worked on. Additionally, the staff to do the work is often viewed as individual players to be added piecemeal to a project, rather than looking at balanced teams that can work together and complement each other.
Spreading people too thin
Simply being assigned to two project teams results in about a 20% productivity loss. There is no such thing as being split 50%-50% between projects -- it is more like 40%-40% with the remaining 20% being lost to context switching. Studies show that each context switch takes at least 30 minutes. And the more project teams an individual is assigned to, the more loss there is.
Less obvious is the wasted effort at the portfolio and program levels trying to manage too many simultaneous projects. Organizations spend countless hours trying to rebalance project staffing to react to the latest crisis or shift in project priority. This constant thrashing creates a whiplash effect throughout the organization. Those on the tail end don’t know what their priority should be among their multiple projects. This isn’t fair to the individual team members.
But more to the point, shouldn’t senior management be setting the direction and priority, not leaving it to individuals to figure out?
Finding focus with agile
We all instinctively want to prioritize our projects and only work on the top priorities. If we do that, we can knock them out quickly and then turn to the next priority. Agile provides a two pronged approach for identifying priorities and then focusing people on them.
First, start small. Create small, persistent teams and feed work into them, instead of setting up a new project for each new work request and then assigning people to those teams. From the teams’ perspective, they have a single source of work and a single source of priority. Additionally, the teams gain efficiency by working with each other over time and on a regular cadence.
Second, use agile tools to identify and prioritize. At the program and portfolio levels, organizations have proven Agile and Lean tools to identify and prioritize the most valuable and necessary ideas and work efforts -- and ensure that prioritization is communicated throughout the organization. Agile at scale frameworks use these principles to enable even the largest enterprises to continually deliver value, while releasing new products more frequently and improving their time to market.
These two interrelated approaches, one delivering focus at the individual and team level, the other providing prioritization and vision at the organizational level, can yield productivity gains of 20-50%. That is the potential of agile.
Talk to us about how Summa can help you shift from how much work you are doing, to focusing on how much value you are producing, and achieve the maximum potential of your organization.
