Does technology make us more efficient?

A few days ago I was talking to my brother.  He works at a small consulting company, and he is not very happy with his boss (and I’m being polite).

They are struggling to get new contracts, and they have reached the point where they have agreed to work a few hours less a week, and obviously get paid less.  The funny thing is that his boss is always extremely busy.  He works over 12 hours a day, and it is not strange to receive an email from him at 1 or 5 a.m.  And of course he has a Blackberry so that he can read and send emails from anywhere at any time.

Last Monday my brother sent an email to his manager because he needed an executive decision from him.  On Thursday he hadn’t had any feedback from him and time was running out, so he went to his desk and asked him: “Did you see the email I sent on Monday?”.  My brother was shocked when he heard the answer: “No, I haven’t read any emails this week”.  And not only that, but he had a chance to see how many unread emails he had in his Inbox:  over 1200!!!  He then remembered that his former manager was low-tech, and instead of using the latest mobile, he used to write phone number on paper serviettes.  So that lead to the question: (more…)

I just finished a week of hard work and long hours. I want to share the experience with you because it clearly shows how stopping and planning can help you.

The task

We had to prepare a proposal for  a complex system.  The competition was expected to be high, so our proposal had to be high quality.  We have been working on the concept for this system for a long time, so we had a clear view of what the system should look like.

The challenge

We only had 3 weeks to prepare everything.  We had to discuss the solution with several areas in our company and with a subcontractor.  By the time we had everything agreed, we only had less than two weeks to produce the documentation.  The amount of required documents was larger than we expected, which made things even more difficult.

The plan

We knew all the documents we had to prepare and the clock was ticking.  So what does your body do?  It forces you into action!  For a second we were tempted to start working, because we knew already what we had to do.  But did we really?  We had a mental list of the documents and a preliminary distribution between the (at that time) 2 persons working on the proposal.  But we realized that wasn’t enough.  So we stopped, wrote all the documents on a whiteboard and made an estimation of how long it would take to finish each of them.  The result was shocking.  If our estimation was correct, we had to work over 16 hours a day to meet the deadline!!

Thanks to this 10 minute planning, we had the arguments to convince our boss to give us another person to work full time on the bid and distribute some tasks among other people in the department.

The execution

One of my colleagues had the idea to keep the list of documents on the whiteboard and write the progress at least twice a day to monitor if we were on track.  I have to say that it was a great idea, and not for the progress monitoring, that we could have done in a different manner.  But it was for the motivation.  Every time someone stood up and increased one of the percentages we had a rush of excitement and we knew we were making progress.  And whenever someone felt overwhelmed, we could look up at the whiteboard, check the status and see what the objective progress was.  And most of the times the situation was better than what our mind told us, especially when we were tired.

The conclusion

Even when you know that you should plan, it’s easy to rush into action without much thought.  And we should avoid it.  See what 10 minutes did for us.  Hadn’t we stopped then, we wouldn’t have had the extra help and our technical proposal would have been poor.

And this shows that planning is helpful for every task we have to do.  Some people tend to think that only project managers should plan and monitor progress.  But the truth is, if you plan your everyday tasks you become much more productive because you manage your time instead of spending it.

So, every time you feel overwhelmed by all the work you have to do, please don’t just jump into action.  Stop and plan first.

One of the most important jobs of the project manager is to delegate project tasks. This is specially important when the project manager has a heavy technical background. It these cases, the temptation to do something because you can do it (and you are comfortable doing it) is very strong. Most of us (if not all) have been there before, and we find lots of reasons to justify what we are doing:

• I can do it much faster than anyone else
• The quality will be better if I do it
• There is no one else who can do it, or they are very busy
• I don’t have time to ask someone else to do it

The truth is that all this reasons are excuses, and while in the short term it might work, the result in the long term is negative.

Think about it.  Are your reasons the real problem?  Or are there other underlying reasons?  Let’s analyze some of them:

• I can do it much faster than anyone else:   it might be true today.  But aren’t you doing it because it is easier than teaching someone else?  Or even worse, are you afraid that the person you teach will do it better than you in the near future?
• The quality will be better if I do it:  when you say better, do you mean your way?  or maybe you had bad experiences in the past because you didn’t specify well enough what you wanted.  And in that case it is normal that you don’t get what you expected
• There is no one else who can do it, or they are very busy:  was this task planned?  Was it assigned to someone?  In many cases this reasoning shows a lack of planning.
• I don’t have time to ask someone else to do it:  this sounds similar to I don’t have time to plan.  Teaching someone else to do something is not a waste of time, it’s an investment!  Think of the time you will be able to save in the future having this person well trained.

And you also have to think that the more indispensable you are, the more difficult it will be take advantage of new opportunities, such as a promotion or a new interesting project in your department.  Do you think your boss will let you go if there is no one ready to take over?

I hope I convinced you to delegate more.  It is not easy, but in the end it is very rewarding for you, and for the person you trust to delegate to.

Have you ever been to a meeting that meets any (or many) of these criteria?

• You don’t know why you were called to that meeting
• The meeting lasts way longer than the scheduled duration
• People digress and no decisions are made
• You contribute to the meeting for 10 minutes but have to be there for an hour
• The meeting started 15 minutes late because not everyone was on time

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been to many of those!  In my opinion, inefficient meetings are one of the biggest time robbers nowadays.  Every time we find a problem we tend to call a meeting with lots of people to decide what to do. Or the project manager calls the whole team to update the status of the project.  Or the boss has a new bright idea and wants everyone to listen to it.

Don’t get me wrong.  Meetings are a powerful tool if used correctly.  Try the following guidelines and you will notice an increase in productivity:

• Send an agenda with enough time in advance so that everyone can prepare the meeting.  This includes the material that has to be prepared beforehand
• Start the meeting on time.  Many people do not consider highly important to be on time for a meeting (in the end it is not a train that would leave.  The meeting will still be there if I am late).  I personally consider it a lack of respect for the ones that were on time.  If you can start the meeting, go ahead without the missing people.  If you can’t, let him/her know that you have been waiting for them, and they will probably be on time next time.
• Set a time limit for each item on the agenda.
• Call only the people that are necessary for the meeting.  And as you have set a time limit for each topic, you could have someone attending only part of the meeting.
• Do not discuss about topics that are not on the agenda.  Avoid going off-topic or you will lose control.  If the topic is relevant, write it down and discuss it either at the end of the meeting (if there is time) or in a future meeting.
• Make a short summary after each item on the agenda.  You have to make sure that everyone has the same understanding after the discussion.
• For each of the actions that arise, identify the scope of the action, the person responsible to do it and the deadline.  It’s very typical to hear something like “we have to do this”, and it usually results in nothing being done.
• Write the minutes and distribute them, identifying all the agreements and actions.

There is nothing is these guidelines that is difficult to do.  It is just a matter of getting used to it and educate your co-workers to do the same.  After a few meetings you it will become natural and you will have much more effective meetings.

Although the steps above assume you are the meeting leader, it also works when you are not.  In that case you are obviously more limited, but you can try to help the leader.  For instance, you can ask for the agenda when you receive something like “Project X meeting from 10:00 to 12:00″ or you can suggest to talk about that new topic at the end of the meeting if there is a deviation from the agenda.  People are usually smart and if they see that their meetings are better when they follow your recommendations, they will end up adopting them.