Undocumented Features

Does it seem like everyone in your organization is always overworked? Is it a struggle to get resources from other groups, or worse, within your own group? There are many possibilities for why this occurs. One of them may be how your organization validates the hiring of employees.

Most organizations hire full-time employees based on full-time work. That is, if you can prove that there is a constant 40 hours a week of work for a given position, you may have the position. If the work is temporary, i.e. project-based and will end when a project ends, it’s much harder to hire. You know at some point the project will be over, and when it is, you will not (in theory) have work for that person.

If your company validates positions in this way, you should consider the basis of the work that your company or department does. Is it primarily project-based, or is it more standardized? If your IT department is like most IT shops, for example, you have some people who are responsible for continuous tasks- supporting applications, for example, or systems administration, and you have some people who are responsible for completely project-based work. The project-based people are constantly executing one project after another. The work they do on a project ends in time, so they are temporary, yet at the end of that project there is always another project. You also probably have some people who do a percentage of each- some routine work, some project-based.

If this is the case, you should be careful to examine how you are justifying time when you hire people. If the nature of what the position does will consist of 50% project-based work, include that. Fight HR and anyone else you have to in order to stick to this, but do so. If you hire all your people to fulfill tasks that must be done, then you will always be overrun when the temporary, project-based work comes around. Resources will always be too tight. Project deadlines will always be threatened. Management will become a group of competitors jockeying for resources to finish their projects instead of working together as a team. You will create overworked labor that resents their bosses and their conflicting priorities, a management team that competes with each other to get what they need to do their jobs rather than helping each other, and an executive team that looks inept from the ‘trench’ view because they have failed to plan labor right and appear to demand the impossible from their employees without providing enough resources to accomplish things. Your company is a team competing with other companies- don’t let your hiring processes reduce it to competing with itself.

This is a very old, old maxim, but I think it’s worth repeating.  Every experienced PM and manager has heard this before:  the more complicated the problem you face, the smaller the steps you should break it down into to solve the problem.  This applies to everything from organizational and cultural problems to basic software design to building a deck in your back yard, and everywhere in between.

It’s worth repeating and thinking about because, simply, every one of us forgets this sometimes.  You have a big, complex problem and next thing you know there’s a whole committee of people in a room holding a meeting and beating the issue to death- in the mean time, no one’s working on anything.  90% of the time, the actual solution is find the first step of solving the problem, set someone to work on that, then pull a plan together to solve the rest of the problem- in the smallest, easiest to solve pieces as are possible.

I recommend that, if you have anything in your office to remind you of something you should think about every day, this should be it:  when in doubt, eat the elephant one bite at a time.  Remembering this daily will help save you months and months of work over your career.