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Multitasking Is Costing You Millions
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about
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The Perception
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Multitasking, a work paradigm that is widely perceived as a productivity
enhancer, is actually costing you millions of dollars every year. After
eliminating multitasking from their multi-project operations, some companies
are now saving those millions, by avoiding massive payroll increases. |
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Multitasking is a task-level paradigm. A multitasking developer has several
tasks active simultaneously. The developer shifts his/her focus from task to
task many times before completing any of them. Multitasking developers
typically are perceived as being diligent, hard-working, valuable, and very
busy, which they most certainly are. |
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Most managers perceive multitasking as a productivity-enhancing paradigm,
since it allows them to start projects that otherwise would have to wait for
developers to become available. Consequently, many managers actively
encourage their developers to multitask. If your organization performs
product-development projects or IT-projects, then multitasking is probably
devastating your organization's performance in these areas right now.
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How can you tell if multitasking is widespread in your organization? To find
out, just look at the ratio of the number of active tasks to the number
of developers. If this ratio is greater than about 1.2, then multitasking is
probably running rampant throughout your enterprise. If the ratio is
approaching 3, well, yikes!
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The Reality |
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Why is multitasking such a big problem? The answer to this question is
explored best in two steps. First, imagine that you’re a customer at a bank.
As you wait in an unpleasantly long line, for your turn with the teller, you
notice that the teller is doing something unusual. Rather than completing
each customer’s transaction, the teller is beginning the transaction of the
second customer and even that of the third customer. The teller is
task-switching, from one transaction to another, without completing any
transaction. Before long, the teller has four or five open transactions,
with none of them close to being completed. The teller is multitasking.
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Would you expect to complete your banking any sooner, given the teller’s
multitasking paradigm? Obviously not! In fact, you can probably expect to be
delayed further, by the mistakes that the teller’s frequent context
switching is sure to cause.
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Of course, bank tellers don’t multitask. In such an environment,
multitasking is obviously damaging, so, workers simply don’t do it. Nor
would bank managers tolerate it for long, even if some workers decided to
try it.
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Working for WIP |
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Any bank-teller who decides to multitask is making a big mistake. Such a
teller is choosing to misdirect capacity, away from generating throughput
(in the form of completed transactions) and toward creating more and more
work in process, WIP.
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Of course, bank-tellers and knowledge workers aren’t quite the same. But, the mechanism that damages the throughput of product-development
organizations and IT-organizations is identical. When your developers
multitask, they are misdirecting their own far more expensive capacity, away
from generating completed projects that make
money and toward creating more and more work in process. The effect of
this misdirection of capacity is that
the organization completes projects at a
much reduced rate.
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By how much is the completion-rate reduced? One software development organization,
Confluence, increased its completion-rate from 6 completed projects per year to
11 completed projects per year. It did so simply by eliminating
multitasking, without hiring a single additional developer. Another
organization increased its completion-rate from 5 one year to 16 the next, again without hiring a single additional developer.
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How did these organizations make such improvements? They changed their
management process, that’s right, their management process. They replaced
their antiquated management policies and practices, which were forcing their
developers to multitask, with management policies and practices that enabled
resource-teams to achieve and sustain maximum productivity.
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Today, most organizations simply
continue to suffer largely unrecognized
financial losses, which multitasking is
inflicting upon their businesses. A few
have taken action. They’ve undertaken a
change process that has nearly doubled
the real productivity of their
product-development or IT-operations.
Inevitably, other organizations will
follow. But for the shareholders of
those other organizations, improvement
will be none too soon.
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top
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--- END --- |
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