This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Promises and Prescriptions
Part 4 - Multi-Project & Mixed-Function Multi-Tasking -- One of the major impediments to doing one's best work on the task at hand is not related to lack of ability, but rather to the fact that there are, too often, too many tasks at hand.
Software projects are usually delivered as one of a portfolio of efforts and often share resources with others in the pipeline. Even if some critical technology resources are dedicated to specific projects, there are always some shared resources. It is not unusual for scarce, highly skilled contributors to support multiple projects. It is also common for certain functions, such as testing, that are heavily used across many projects to become overwhelmed with work.
The usual response to having a lot of work in one's inbox is to use the squeaky wheel method of prioritization. Whichever project is squeaking the loudest in the morning gets attention for the day, whether the previous day's task is completed or not. Multi-tasking is, unfortunately, often seen as a laudable talent. In reality, bouncing back and forth between unfinished tasks in an effort to show progress merely delays all the handoffs involved and wastes valuable capacity in unnecessary set-down, set-up, and "Where was I?" questions at every restart.
Best case multi-tasking situation...
Add context switching delays for real impact.
This is really an issue of understanding pipeline capacity. Most software projects do not exist in a vacuum. Software organizations are often responsible for at least two functions -- development/deployment of new systems and production/maintenance of existing systems. While major maintenance efforts can be added to the project portfolio to-do list and managed as projects, there are still day-to-day issues that need to be addressed to keep the business running. Even when projects are carefully defined in terms of resource requirements, unplanned emergencies can affect progress.
(Prescriptions for multi-tasking are next in the series.)
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