Research shows that drive-by work requests, meetings, and interruptions can take
a significant toll on productivity. The result? Enterprise workers end up using less
than half their time on their primary job responsibilities. With more than half your
day shot to pieces by unplanned requests and interruptions, it's almost impossible
to be productive.
And you know where that leads: the death spiral of late nights, weekends, and
total burnout.
If you're tired of a productivity-killing work environment that leaves you struggling
to survive each day, then read on. Learn how to stop this drive-by cycle and gain
precious hours.
You've got your day all mapped out. First, you'll tackle a draft of the network
security plan, then you'll work on configuring the point-of-service hardware
for the website, and if you have time, you'll address a database update for
the marketing department. But, before you've even had your first sip of
coffee, things go south. The CFO calls to say there's a glitch in the payroll
software and he needs it fixed today so he can run payroll. You dash up to
his office to find out what's going on. By the time you get back, you've got a
sticky note request on your desk from the marketing manager asking you to
run a geolocation visit report for the last three weeks. You're afraid to even
open your email for fear of more requests ready to ambush you.
In one study, ad hoc requests comprised nearly 50% of respondents' team
work hours. Beyond the personal frustration of never being able to tackle
what you planned on, there's also a high organizational cost to this kind
of ad hoc work environment. When your day is consumed by unplanned
work, the planned work doesn't get done. This creates a cascading effect
of projects that end up sidelined or delayed–at a considerable cost to the
organization. For example, a project that is three months late to market can
result in a 26.9% decrease in revenue.
When requests come at you constantly and from all different directions
delivered in the hallway, on sticky notes, or through emails—it's also easy for
them to get lost or forgotten. You know the scenario...your boss says,
"Hey, I asked you last week to have a demo ready for our online banking
tool...tomorrow's the stakeholder meeting, are we all set?" Only now is it
vaguely coming back to you that you were even asked (in the hallway on
your way to the bathroom) to do this. Yup, fire drill time.
It is also difficult to decipher what work is urgent and what can wait. In fact,
20% of enterprise workers surveyed said that a lack of understanding about
the urgency or time-sensitive nature of a task was the most common source
of conflict with other departments or teams, and more than one in three
attributed their work failures to a lack of clear processes and priorities.
Incorrectly prioritizing work can lead to serious financial consequences as
well as some pretty unhappy stakeholders. But accurately triaging work is
tough when you can never get out of crisis mode.
“There was a lot of changing back and forth followed up
by phone calls, catching people in the hallway, or emailing
them, and work requests could get lost in the shuffle of
emails. It took a lot of time, and it was very inefficient,
considering it was such an important process.”
THOM DELOZAL
Program Manager, Sealants for PPG Aerospace
To stop the drive-by chaos, you've got to start with enforcement. Require
that all requests be submitted in the same way to a central location. No more
hallway requests, random emails, or notes left on desks. Requests may be
submitted through a work management tool, a shared spreadsheet, or some
other system, but there must be no exceptions to the rule. If a request isn't
submitted correctly, the request won't be considered. Period. Once all work
is in the pipeline, and you and your entire IT team can see what's being
asked of you, it's much easier to see what work is truly urgent, what can wait,
and how to best delegate tasks based on who is working on what.
Effective prioritization also eliminates a lot of fire drills. When all work is
visible and when it is prioritized against other work, it gets done—in the right
order—before it becomes an emergency. High-performing IT organizations
spend less than 5% of their time on unplanned work versus the 45% to 55%
of average organizations. That's a big difference. By taking control of
driveby requests, you could gain an average of four hours a day. This is time you
could spend on your planned to-do list and on meeting the organization’s
strategic priorities.
“Request management has absolutely boosted our project
success ratings. When I get an intake request, it takes me
only 10 to 15 minutes to look at the capacity planner, check
the projects that are listed, see what's already in the request
queue, and turnaround that request. It's very, very quick,
compared to what we did earlier last year.”
TIFFANY SCHEPENS
Manager of PMO for Tampa General Hospital
Today, more than a third of all meetings are ad hoc and more than 50% of employees
report that the number of meetings they have is increasing.
Even worse, 67% of employees report that more than half of the meetings they attend are not of value.
You don't have to be a mathematician to know this equals a lot of wasted time and
squandered productivity.
In fact, some employees spend so much time interacting with one another that they
must do the rest of their jobs when they get home at night. Sound familiar? But, what
many organizations may not realize is that the cost is far higher than having to devote
nights and weekends to work. Collaboration overload can not only damage employees'
productivity and health, but also erode performance and stall innovation.
When put in this light, the cost of constant unplanned meetings, even when the meetings are
productive, is simply too high. There has to be a better way
“Trying to track people down became more and more
problematic, and we had so many different meetings to
talk about a project. You had to dig through emails to find
correspondence, and people were printing them out and
putting them in folders, and you just didn’t know what
was going on or what was happening.”
SCOTT ELLIS
Director of Engineering for IDEX Health and Science
What if there was a way to communicate all the information shared in a meeting
without holding a meeting? Ditto for all your peers. Thanks to technological
advances over the last several years, there are ways to streamline communication
and collaboration so everyone who needs to work together can—without constantly
filing into a room to discuss face-to-face.
With 32% of all meetings now held virtually and 48% of all meetings one-on-one
rather than group meetings, the type of meetings being held is also changing
significantly. The good news is that these more flexible types of meetings and the
use of technology to initiate the meetings means that employees are comfortable
with online solutions to the ubiquitous meeting problem.
The first step is to find a tool that lets you collaborate in the context of the work.
Email doesn't do this, because it's too easy to leave someone off an email thread.
Email is also really good at getting lost and forgotten in an overflowing inbox. But,
there are tools that use a social approach to track collaboration and communication
in the context of work. And, they can do it both virtually and in real time. This
keeps everyone informed of the status of a project or task, lets them know what
the next steps are, and lets everyone share their ideas in a collaborative manner.
This can eliminate the need for status update meetings and allow productive group
collaboration without a visit to the conference room.
In fact, implementing a social approach to project communication can reduce the
time employees spend searching for content by 35%. Add to that another 20% to
25% of potential overall productivity improvement that is possible when employees
use social tools and you can begin to see your productivity coming back to life.
“I used to go to meetings two or three times a week where
we’d get together and talk about projects and their status.
Now, I’ll attend maybe one meeting a month, because I
already know.”
STEVE MALCHOW
VP Operations for Trek Bicycle Corporation
You are deep in concentration, scrolling through the code to find the right place to
insert a bug fix when a colleague pops her head in and asks, "Excuse me, do you
have a minute?" You'd like to say no, but the truth is, it doesn't matter now—your
concentration is already broken. You'll have to start combing through the code all
over again, whether you answer her question or not. And what is the question? "Hey,
I was just wondering where we were at on getting that new website integration
feature ready for testing." Nothing urgent, but it was something she didn't know and
you did because you have the spreadsheet tracking the progress of the project.
These kinds of interruptions happen all day long. Knocks on the door, phone
calls, or the ping of an instant message may seem harmless, but they're not. They
are productivity-sucking parasites. One recent study concluded that 28% of the
average office worker's day is spent dealing with unnecessary interruptions and
subsequently recapturing focus. And in another survey, 41% of respondents said
unexpected phone calls interrupted their work. But, perhaps even more troubling
is new research that shows unscheduled interruptions at work leave people more
exhausted and more prone to make errors. Even short interruptions can turn into
long ones. Studies show that it can take 25 minutes before you return to the same
task and 50 minutes before you can get back to deep concentration where you are
doing your best work on a complex task. That's a lot of productive time down the
tube for just one interruption. Multiply it by numerous interruptions a day and it's
easy to see why your productivity is on life support.
“The executives wanted information quickly, and they wanted
us to make decisions off of up-to-date information. But the only
way for us to do that was to constantly be in touch with all 250
members of the department. That was the kicker.”
TIFFANY SCHEPENS
Manager of PMO for Tampa General Hospital
While you can't eliminate all interruptions, you can significantly decrease them
by making the information your bosses and peers are seeking available to them
proactively. Instead of keeping track of project status, who's working on what, or
other project details on a personal spreadsheet or in your head, you need to create
visibility across the organization.
When you allow complete visibility, in real time, across the organization, no one is left
wondering what the status of a project is, and there will be fewer interruptions to find
out who is working on what, when it will be done, or if the project budget is at risk. In
addition, creating easy touchpoints, like a dashboard, will allow busy executives and
stakeholders to have understandable, at-a-glance, real-time updates without having to
ask. All of which means fewer interruptions for you and more time to focus on getting
valuable work done.
“Our engineers can communicate to the other stakeholders
what’s happening and see what the status is without having to
run around and find five different people. They also like that I’m
not pinging them every other day to figure out what their status
is and what’s going on, because I can go look for myself and I
already know what’s happening.”
SCOTT ELLIS
Director of Engineering for IDEX Health and Science
If you're ready to retire your firefighter uniform and enjoy what real
productivity feels like, it's time to meet Enterprise Work Management (EWM).
EWM is an innovative solution that allows you to take back the 45% to 55%
of your day that’s disrupted with ad hoc work by:
1 – Providing a single system for all work requests, both planned and
unplanned, eliminating costly fire drills.
2 – Streamlining communication and collaboration in one, social-media-like
space, reducing the need for constant status meetings.
3 – Increasing visibility across the organization, resulting in fewer
interruptions for you and more time to be productive.
EWM takes the chaos out of your work environment and turns the process
into a smooth, productive operation where the right work gets done at the
right time.
AtTask is a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution that helps IT
departments, PMOs, and other enterprise teams conquer the problems
associated with traditional project management. Using a combination of
technology and expertise acquired from serving customers in various industries
across the globe, AtTask provides a single system of truth that eliminates work
chaos, provides global visibility, and increases productivity. AtTask offers a
complete adoptable solution—powerful enough for technical users, intuitive
enough for business stakeholders, and flexible enough to support Agile, Waterfall,
or a mix of the two. It works in the same ways you do.
To learn more about AtTask Enterprise Work Management for IT work management,
and how it can increase enterprise productivity, please contact us at the following:
“The breadth of the functionality
in AtTask really sold us. We
wanted a single piece of
software that we could use
across the whole organization,
and AtTask did that better
than any of the other tools we
reviewed.”
CHRIS YADON
VP of Operations
Netsteps Llc