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.
Friday, February 20, 2004
Promises and Prescriptions Part 5 - Set a Priority to Eliminate Multi-tasking -- It's easy to fall into multi-tasking, because it sounds like it will make things go faster. It won't. It will only keep people busy—and unavailable for really moving projects along to completion. It's hard to break the habit, but the results are worth it.
At the project task level, don't allow yourself to be bullied into multi-tasking behaviors. Ask those who are treating your time and attention as the rope in a game of tug-of-war to agree on priorities, and work the tasks start-to-finish in priority order. If they won't do that, tell them what priorities you have chosen and get to work on them, one at a time. As the person delivering task outputs, your effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of work-life will be enhanced. More importantly to project success, the people waiting for your outputs will get them sooner than if you had split your time among them, squeaking out small pieces of illusory progress without really completing anything.
At the portfolio level, prioritize and launch projects only at the rate that the system can absorb them. If you try pushing ten pounds of project through a five-pound pipeline, you won't even get five pounds of successful projects through to the end, as capacity is wasted in the context switching. Set clear priorities for the promising of projects. Get an understanding of the capacity limits of your software development system and set up mechanisms to use them effectively and efficiently.
When determining your project throughput capacity, consider planned and unplanned work. Just because we tend to plan projects as if they were in a vacuum doesn't make it so. Take into consideration the other necessary uses of resource time before promising projects and launching them into the pipeline. At the same time, make those promises in a way that is resilient to needs of emergencies and opportunities.
(Next up...the issue of fear of promising the unknown.)
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