Why Is Everyone Working So Hard?

by: stacey - December 22nd, 2011   Filed under: Leadership, Management Add Comment

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.

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Sweat the Small Stuff

by: stacey - December 21st, 2011   Filed under: Project Management Add Comment

In project management, it is often the commonplace that trips us up.

People overlook easy things when faced with challenges. Some do it because they fear the difficult task, and thus their focus is on it and not the simple tasks before them. Some relish the challenge of the difficult. Those folks will overlook the simple stuff just the same.

Tough and difficult tasks in your projects will usually be done well- at least, to the best that your staff is capable of. They will bring their ‘A’ game, think, and pay attention. The tough tasks will draw attention and praise if done well. You don’t have to sweat these things- if your staff can do them, they will. Just put the right people on it and give it the right amount of attention.

The small things, on the other hand, can kill you. People assigned to the tough jobs will often slop their way through the easy tasks to get them out of the way. They’ll guess wildly at estimates, do the work too quickly, forget basic details and costs. Don’t let this happen to you. Sweat these details. Get the small work doublechecked, including the estimates. If possible, keep as much of the small work away from the people doing the heavy lifting on your project- not to help them do the hard work better, but to insure that the small work it done well.

Remember, a car will fail faster if you forget to tighten the lug nuts as it will if you don’t get the compression ratio of the engine just right. Always sweat the little things.

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Cheerleading is Important Too

by: stacey - December 20th, 2011   Filed under: Leadership Add Comment

Have you ever taken your car to a mechanic and found the mechanic to be in a horrible mood? Did you feel uncomfortable driving your car later, worried that he was too unhappy to do his job well?

Just as you don’t want a car fixed by a disgruntled mechanic, your customers will not want a product built by disgruntled employees. Unhappy people tend to focus on their unhappiness and fail to focus well on the task at hand. Worse, sometimes they focus their unhappiness on that task, messing it up on purpose. Even when they mean well, they work slowly, and they make mistakes.

What does all this add up to for you as a manager? Morale matters. One of your jobs as a manager is to lead people in performing activities quickly, effectively, and efficiently. Unhappy employees do none of these things. You should take an active role in motivating your team. When problems arise, take an active role in solving them. When an employee is beyond your help, though, you must recognize this and react to it. This may involve shifting responsibilities temporarily, or it may involve taking more permanent action. Either way, morale matters. Raise it when you can, deal with it when you cannot.

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