A friend told me an odd story. Two developers from another team were allocated at a total of 40% into a particular project. They were given a task which they’ve estimated they could complete by January.
The PM Prodded and pushed. “Finish it by December,” he demanded. Eventually, after tireless nagging, the two conceded and said they will deliver by December as requested.
“How will they do that,” I wondered. Apparently, nothing changed — only the deadline. The amount of work to be done is still the same. Their measly 0.25 and 0.15 allocations were retained as is. What was the January estimate then? Had they padded their initial estimates such that it would actually be feasible to complete the task by December? Or will they have to render overtime work to cope and meet the deadline?
Instances like these make me wonder whether the PM ever did math problems while he was back in school. Joe works at a rate of N hours per day. A given task takes X hours. How many days will it take for Joe to finish his work? Judith needs to complete a task that requires X hours in N days? How many hours per day will Judith have to work? How many Judiths are needed if each Judith can only work Z hours per day?
Occasionally, we come across folks who say they want change or who are ranting about how things are currently done. (Chances are, at one point or another, we’re one of those folks.) But then after some time, we get in touch with them and find out that nothing had changed even though it’s perfectly within their power (or their limits) to trigger the change. In asking why, we sometimes get to the sad conclusion that nothing changed because nothing was changed. They just shrugged things off, maybe, or hoped that things would somehow just get better. At best, if they had even bothered to note down, what they end up with is a growing list of problems where nothing gets crossed off.
That list of wants or rants won’t magically get resolved. Stating the problem is not enough to get it solved just as stating the goal is not enough to get it done. It’s a start. But there’s got to be a change in mindset from simply just saying “I want X!” to coming up with something like “I want X so here’s what we can do…” I think Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best: A goal without a plan is just a wish. Of course, planning won’t suffice — there are still the harder parts of following through with the plan (personally, I go by plan-do-check-act). But unless someone drives the change, you’re pretty much stuck to just waiting for nothing to happen.
Scott Berkun released a new book recently entitled Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. It’s a collection of essays some of which were from his blog. He made it available for download for free for 48 hours; with the only catch being you’ll have to sign up to his monthly mailing list. Upon finding out about it, I went ahead and downloaded a copy. There’s still 15 hours and some more minutes to go and download.
For starters, I like the title of the book. Mindfire. I can so tie it up to one of my favorite quotes (yes, just because it has the words mind and fire in it): “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” – Plutarch. I read the first essay this morning. It was something I’ve already read from his blog but didn’t mind rereading because it was one of the posts I liked from his blog. Cult of Busy. I remember how I set my chat status to “Busy” by default. Initially, I didn’t get what that status was for. Wasn’t everyone supposed to be working on what they’re supposed to be working on ergo busy should be the default? Are those who are on “Available for chat” idle? As I went along, available or busy didn’t make any difference. If folks had something to ask, they just went right ahead. Anyway, I’ve digressed.
Back to the essay… I like how the it echoes (much nicely) my disdain for being busy as an ideal state. Say, dudes A and B were working on the same stuff. A slacks off, works carelessly, and then does overtime for rework and to compensate. B works efficiently finishing the task ahead of time, giving him time to go over some tech blogs that he follows. From some perspective, A would probably appear busy while B is slacking off; and A might even get rewarded, while B goes unrewarded and gets more tasks dumped onto him. Sucks.
Taxi has arrived. Got to cut this short. But do check out Scott Berkun’s writing. This post does not do him justice.
