
Vortex cores about an F18 fighter jet. The figure depicts vortex cores overlaid with streak lines. The vortex cores are represented by black line segments and the streak lines are colored by time at release. Creating turbulence drains energy from the aircraft. So it is with organizational turbulence — the chaotic group behavior that happens when too many different tasks compete with each other for people with skills that are in high demand within the organization. Even though all the projects might eventually be completed successfully, we can consider organizational turbulence to be the scurrying related to finding people and holding onto them until their work is complete. That activity (the scurrying) drains energy from the organization by adding costs to almost everything it does. Photo courtesy U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
First things first: when referring to people in the abstract, I prefer words like "someone," "person," or "people." I dislike the word "resources," which, to me, evokes things like equipment, timber, and coalmines. OK. That's out of the way.
When team members have responsibilities to multiple teams, those teams all face risks. The unexpected happens. Priorities change. Schedules change. Time commitments cannot always be honored. We might try to schedule our efforts, but when team members belong to multiple teams, the plan and the reality are sometimes wildly different, even if the root cause of the trouble is elsewhere.
Here are four guidelines for sharing people more effectively than we often do.
- Front-load the activities of shared people
- Trouble sometimes arises in partner efforts. If resolving that trouble requires additional time from someone you share, you could lose access to that person. Moreover, even if the partner project goes smoothly, difficulties in other projects could result in schedule changes for the partner project, and the shared person might not be available at the time you scheduled.
- If possible, schedule your own efforts so that the work that shared people do happens early.
- Adjust effort estimates for interruption of flow
- During planning, when we estimate effort, we often assume that the person doing the work is doing nothing else. Since that assumption is invalid for people with divided responsibilities, and since juggling multiple assignments does have associated costs, our estimates tend to be lower than the actual time required.
- Make estimates that realistically account for the loss of time due to multiple assignments. When tracking actual effort data, track assignment multiplicity, too.
- Combine hours into the longest possible contiguous bursts
- To minimize Combine hours into the longest
possible contiguous burstslosses due to interruption of flow in the context of split assignments, combine hours of effort for each person into the largest possible contiguous chunks. Instead of one day per week for six weeks, schedule two days per week for three weeks, or four days in one week, and two days three weeks later. - You might have to negotiate with partner team leads, but when they understand the advantages of contiguous bursts, the negotiations are likely to be smooth.
- Avoid the "MS Project flat rate syndrome"
- Planners tend to use as weekly effort estimates for each person, the total estimated effort for each person divided by the task duration in weeks. Rarely does work actually proceed in this way. Even if it did, such a pattern maximizes the losses due to multiple assignments, because it maximally interrupts flow.
- Actual work is usually performed in bursts. Use your project planning software to schedule those bursts.
People with multiple assignments are usually less effective than they would be if they had only one assignment. And they might be called away at any time. Plan for it. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
The Risky Role of Hands-On Project Manager
- The hands-on project manager manages the project and performs some of the work, too. There are lots
of excellent hands-on project managers, but the job is inherently risky, and it's loaded with potential
conflicts of interest.
How to Make Good Guesses: Tactics
- Making good guesses probably does take talent to be among the first rank of those who make guesses.
But being in the second rank is pretty good, too, and we can learn how to do that. Here are
some tactics for guessing.
Durable Agreements
- People at work often make agreements in which they commit to cooperate — to share resources, to
assist each other, or not to harm each other. Some agreements work. Some don't. What makes agreements durable?
How to Get Out of Firefighting Mode: II
- We know we're in firefighting mode when a new urgent problem disrupts our work on another urgent problem,
and the new problem makes it impossible to use the solution we thought we had for some third problem
we were also working on. Here's Part II of a set of suggestions for getting out of firefighting mode.
Planning Disappointments
- When we plan projects, we make estimates of total costs and expected delivery dates. Often these estimates
are so wrong — in the wrong direction — that we might as well be planning disappointments.
Why is this?
See also Project Management and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
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- When we assess the costs of different options for solving a problem, we must take care not to commit a variety of errors in approach. These errors can lead to flawed decisions. One activity at risk for error is comparing the costs of two options. Available here and by RSS on January 27.
And on February 3: Cost Concerns: Bias
- When we consider the costs of problem solutions too early in the problem-solving process, the results of comparing alternatives might be unreliable. Deferring cost concerns until we fully understand the problem can yield more options and better decisions. Available here and by RSS on February 3.
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