efficiency

Yellow Sticky Notes And Operating Costs

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Once, many years ago (I think in the 2010s?) I interviewed at a video editing software company to be a Project Manager. When I asked what tools they used to track work, they pointed at a glass divider covered in sticky notes. That was it, that’s how they wrote video editing software which, as you may guess, is not exactly a simple process.

If you’re familiar with Agile methods, it may not seem entirely unusual. If you’re not familiar, then I’ll summarize all-too-simply: Agile is about breaking work into small, easy, tested chunks as you go through a larger list of work. It’s basically quick, evaluated development of software in order of importance.

So sticky notes were, in theory, all you needed for Agile, especially if the Product Owner (person with The Big List Of Stuff To Do) had their act together. I’m going to assume this company had one that did since, hey, sticky notes.

This experience stuck with me. Now, some 15+ years later, having used many project management tools, having seem many technical innovations, being friends with people in tech for decades, a lot of us seem to want the sticky notes back.

We’re beset by enormous choices of tools and the tools have choices. You can buy this software package or that and integrate them. All of them have their own workflow which you have to learn, but you can also customize your workflow so you can confuse yourself your own way. Plus you have to work with everyone else’s tools together in some half-baked integration.

But when all of that doesn’t work, does the tool fix it? Nope you get to! So soon you’re downloading a spreadsheet from one tool, to load into another tool, then you have to correct the issues. That’s if you can think like the people that designed the tools or the workflow, and those people weren’t you.

Past a certain point all our new helpful tools require so much learning and reconciliation, we might want to use sticky notes. And yes, I have met people who still use sticky notes in otherwise high-tech organizations.

I’ve begun to wonder if we’ve entered an era where we’re so awash in tools that the price of learning them, customizing them, and integrating them outweighs their value. This is amplified by the latest updates and changes from vendors, companies being bought out, or regulation and policy changes. There’s a lot of change and adaption that we have to put time into so we theoretically become efficient in the time left.

And that’s before there’s a software outage somewhere in the Rube Goldberg world of ours that brings it all to a halt. I’m looking at you, Crowdstrike, I still have trauma as I write this.

I’m finding a great test of good software is to ask how it would work if it wasn’t software. What if was, I don’t know – done by yellow sticky notes? What if the software wasn’t software but a human recorded, human run physical process. Would it still make sense?

This is something I noticed working with certain medical and research software. Some of it may have old-school looks, or be specialized, but it works (and has to or people get hurt). I once took a training course on medical software and it was both insanely complex because of medical processes, but in review everything I learned made perfect sense and I could see how it’d be done on yellow sticky notes. Even I, some IT nerd who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a patient could figure out how this all came together – and had decades before the software existed.

Sometimes it’s worth asking “what if we did this old school” to see what the software should do and how much cost there would be in changing everything or making it incoherent.

And, hey, maybe you’ll just go back to the sticky notes. Maybe you should.

Steven Savage

The Tyranny Of Time Control

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

The last few months I’d felt stressed about time on the weekends – and sometimes during the week. What was weird was I couldn’t quite put my finger on what had happened or why because there was no identifiable cause. Trying to ask “what’s my priority” over “what’s my schedule” helped, but that stress was there.

Eventually I tried just rearranging my schedule, breaking out of the usual. That sometimes relaxed me, sometimes proved to be more stressful. However, I finally realized that I was trying to align a lot of disparate schedules and opportunities – because our modern times, ironically, give us more options to manage.

We have a lot of freedom, a lot of options, and that can be a pain.

For older folks such as myself, it’s easy to remember very regular schedules of the world. You worked in this time zone. Your job was an 8 hour block. You know about time zones and that affected how you might call people. TV and news was on a schedule barring a VCR.

This wasn’t ideal, but I think we all had a sense of other people’s schedules. If you were watching X show, it was probably Y time. We knew this timezone was ahead, this one behind. There was an unspoken schedule we were on.

As technology advanced we got more freedom from the constraints of time and even space. You could chat with anyone online in MIRC, them chat programs, then Discord. You could timeshift communications quickly with emails. You’d work with people in other countries. Entertainment and information wasn’t in any schedule, but was at your fingertips at all times.

We had more options and I think it can be overwhelming because of two reasons – we have options but still have constraints, and everyone else has options too.

Yes you can chat with people anywhere any time – except there are still time zones. We may have control over our work schedule, but we’re still all on different schedules anyway. You can order groceries any time – but have to check store schedules and delivery times. You have a lot of freedom that suddenly careers into harsh reality.

But we still have options, enough options to become overwhelmed. With so many opportunities, we can become overwhelmed (or underwhelmed if we want to overdo it). More options means more work put into choices and priorities – that collide with the above limits.

But the freedom you have is also freedom others have. So the schedules for people become more unpredictable. One friend is on a gaming binge when another is eating dinner. Another can timeshift their day two hours ahead but they’re in the same timezone. Don’t even start on the fact your family is in three countries, four timezomes, and everyone thinks everyone else is always available.

I don’t think we’ve entirely adjusted to all the options we’ve got AND all the limits we still have or created with time. I’m very sure we’ve become worse at coordinating with people to judge by the complaints I’ve heard. That’s before we take a look at the political, environmental, and economic chaos of the world.

Right now I’ve decided it’s time to do two things.

First, I’ve tried shaking up my schedule. That’s helped me find out what works – and is how I got this insight. Trying new things helps me break out of my habits and challenge ways of doing things.

Second, I’ve tried blocking time out more. By thinking in terms of blocks of time, minimizing distractions, and a bit more planning I feel more focused and get things done. The act of blocking time in turn also makes me think about my schedule.

So far this has helped me. But I wonder how the world is doing . . .

Steven Savage

Let’s Talk Cutting Stuff

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

OK, so this is sort of a political post. Yes it’s about the US Government, DOGE, and cutting stuff for “efficiency.” It’s also a post on general efficiency and issues, but because this kind of subject is a mine field let me address it with my usual delicacy and decorum.

DOGE is a dumb, corrupt mix of stunt and coup that also feels like the worst of Silicon Valley Management fads combined with people that don’t know how things work. This may sound embellished, but I also speak as a guy with 30 years of IT experience, way too many certifications, and a skill at cataloging every dumb thing I’ve seen in my career. I come at this from hard, painful experience.

Now with that said, the next statements my seem surprisingly, well, unbiased. Because really good sense and good process sense isn’t hard. We just make it hard.

I’d like to zero in on an idea I’ve seen for way too long, that anything – government, business, charity, your bowling league – has too much bureaucracy. That all you have to do is cut bureaucracy and everything gets more efficient in a kind of Darwninian market magic. This of course is usually wrong, but often in ways that aren’t as obvious and that take time to find out.

Simply put, no, not all bureaucracy, process, etc. is inefficient in that it doesn’t get the job done with appropriate expenses. Shockingly, an amazing amount of things actually work. They may not be perfect, perhaps they can be better, but the amount of “good enough” you’ll see in the world is often higher than you’d think. Things can be better, but let’s put a pin in that for later.

The problem is effective work is not easy to notice unless you’re really good at awareness and have an organization that has good internal awareness. In fact as I’ve stated before some jobs become invisible when done well – like my own, Project and Program Management. Am I saying that sometimes organizations need more reports – and the attendant bureaucracy – to know they’re doing OK?

Honestly, yeah. This is a great example – if you don’t have the right reports (bureaucracy) you might make changes to fix things that are OK.

Anyway, we’ve got the idea that somehow everything is inefficient (for political, social, and economic reasons I may analyze another time). So we believe people who say “well, we’ve got to cut that,” and those people usually have an agenda. I’m not just talking political, a lot of consulting groups make bank telling people how to cut bureaucracy in a kind of oroborous of management hypocrisy.

So people don’t see good work and because of our culture, we go a-cutting and thinking we can make things efficient by getting rid of stuff.

Which, as you may guess, doesn’t really work. We’ve probably all been at a place that was going to cut itself into efficiency, and we probably don’t work there anymore. If we’re so fortunate not to have experienced it, there’s a good chance someone we know has, and will tell us about it at profanity-filled length.

So you don’t just charge into a place and start magically cutting your way to efficiency. You have to analyze goals, workflows, and so on. You have to actually do things and know research. If you don’t do these things you will -intentionally or not – create disaster. If you’ve ever been through cuts and been the Lone Employee Left Over In An Area, you know what I mean.

Now let’s pull the pin out on improving government, business, etc. Let’s talk the thing that doesn’t often get talked about – sometimes you have to do more, hire more, and spend more money to be efficient.

This of course is blasphemy in pop business world because the idea of efficiency is spending less, right? Well much as you sometimes have to spend money to make money, you also need to spend money to have the people, resources, and processes to be efficient. It can cost more to eventually cost left.

It sounds like a paradox, but it’s not. If say a government office isn’t doing great handling things, then it’s wasting money. But you don’t cut if, you may have to spend more to make it work effectively. If you can’t do the job, maybe you have to make sure the department does its job with more money. Sometimes saving isn’t the goal of something.

Yet, surprisingly, shocking to others, things operate better at scale. If spending $1 on a department or business unit saves $2, but spending $5 saves $15, what’s the best choice? I once advised someone on process improvement and found they were in a situation where hiring five more people would save work across hundreds of other employees.

Or it all goes back to goals, research, and understanding. Not cutting. Cutting costs, etc. does not magically make things better, especially when you rush it.

If you want to understand that, we can often look at the business world once you get beyond survivorship bias. But maybe now where I’m seeing angry town halls and protesting park employees (words I didn’t expect to type) you can see random cutting doesn’t work.

Which in some ways is a great irony of the DOGE era. Actions that are arguably governmental are going to be studied by business schools as well. Just not in the way some would have expected.

Hey I got this done without mentioning The Unaccountability Machine. Whoops . . .

Steven Savage