Planning

Today the last offer will be made to one of my new employees. If she says yes, this will mean my team will have shifted from five analysts to ten. It might not seem like it, but this is a huge change in how I have to manage. See, with five people I can pretty easily juggle the assignment, know roughly what people are working on and make realistic predictions of when new work will get done. Even with five, though, there have been patches where people have fallen in the cracks, where I have over requested or under requested.

This looseness can't continue. With ten people it can quickly lead to a bad situation. This does not mean micro-managing, which is sometimes the default position managers move into in a similar situation. I hate micro management.

The tool I am introducing is a version of a Heijunka chart. This is a lean tool used to level processing in a manufacturing plant. In that environment the main resources they are balancing are machines or lines. You can't ask a line to do two things at the same time, you minimize change over, you make sure lines are not limited by inventory, but don't over produce. Anyway, in my version the main resource is people. They only have so much time, they need to balance to the demands of the customers, but should as much as possible complete one thing before moving onto the next. I can't ask for 80 hours of work in a week, but I shouldn't only expect 20 either.

In an ideal state this chart works perfectly. Each row starts with a name and each name has columns for future work, on deck, in process and done. I place important items, which won't be done next week in the future box and items to be done next week in the on deck box. Things being worked on this week are in progress and as they close them they move to done, so I can watch the week get better and better. The in progress column has room for 5 sticky notes and I have whole and half sticky notes to represent 8 and 4 hour blocks. I can look at a couple dashboards and see outstanding work and work as it gets completed, so I can update it without having to ask. Sounds smooth, doesn't it? On paper, this should work like a dream.

The problem with transparency it shows how much people not only don't know, but how bad they are at guessing. In this case, it also highlights for me how much time is spent on not tracked work. Most of my employees report 2-3 hours per day on e-mail, 4 hours a week on meetings, and some of blocks of time devoted to training others. Between 40 and 50 percent of their time on things other than audits, written inquiries, RFPs or Projects, the things we are valued on. Additionally, no one is tracking the numbers behind these things. So, I block the time, but I don't really know enough to figure out how to reduce it, make it value added, or put into place reasonable controls. Then when it comes to the work, I can see the numbers, 1000 errors, 40 tracking tools, 2 project milestones, but getting a read on the hours which should be devoted is nearly impossible when employees reports on how long they take can be wildly different. Is the average written inquiry 5 hours, or 30 minutes? It make a huge difference. I could do the math, but my math doesn't account for these huge swathes of administrative time.

So, this is what I am doing. I am asking everybody for their administrative times, blocks I will hold for them and not schedule against. These I am asking for only once, until I get the other parts of the system worked out. Then, I am making my best guess the first week on applying times to the numbers. At the end of the week, I will look at how I did and adjust my estimates. Lastly, the one element I do think I need to be a little more management heavy on, is in the dashboards. I need them to keep them constantly up to date. For some this is easy, but for others this has never been done. Without that, there is no way for me to track,

Lastly, this project has got me thinking about how we conduct our lives. So much of it is not planned, not estimated, not even thought about enough to add estimations. When I say I'm going to fix that stair on Saturday and instead I don't, it is not because I don't want to fix the stair, it is because I excuse myself with other in the moment things. Not much different than letting e-mail delay closing the next milestone on a project.