Four IT practices that kill productivity

Frequent Reorganizing

It is highly alluring to alter the reporting structure in an effort to resolve resource issues and maintain the project on schedule.

We assume that if a resource cannot handle one group of individuals, it will be able to function effectively in another group.

In other words, we have replaced the set of obstacles with a new one, and the employee now needs to learn how to operate with a new group of individuals.

What to do? – Identify the root cause, and figure out if they need better coaching or training.

Keeping you in the loop

If something occurs in your department, you are expected to be made aware of it before your colleagues and management are made aware of it.

Being informed lessens the worry that a manager would be caught off guard and appear unprofessional to their management. It also gives a manager a sense of importance.

What to do? - Simply let everyone be aware that fixing any issues as soon as they arise is the top priority. The second priority is to brief you.?

Blaming people

Holding people accountable is root cause analysis predicated on the assumption that if something goes wrong it must be someone’s fault. It’s a flawed assumption because most often when something goes wrong, it’s the result of bad systems and processes, not someone screwing up.

The blaming culture stops people from reporting problems to you, they lose their freedom and creativity in the fear of blaming.

What to do? : Whenever something goes wrong, first fix the immediate problem aka “stop the bleeding.” Then, figure out which systems and processes failed to prevent the problem and fix them, so the organization is better prepared next time.

And if it turns out the problem really was that someone messed up, figure out if they need better training and coaching.

We faced a similar situation as one of our employees performed the shutdown on the production server. It was easy to blame that employee but that would not have mitigated the future occurrences. We identified it as a gap and we disabled the shutdown operation of non-administrator users.

Another instance was when HBO shot a blank email to its subscribers. HBO took it in a lighter sense and informed everyone about it.

Lack of processes

In lack of processes, the work done will always be disorganized, ineffective, undocumented, and repetitive. Two people will never have the same way of doing one thing.

It is tempting for employees to bypass the process to get the work done quickly, managers are tempted because if everything is documented, no one will come to them.

What to do? : Document the standard operating procedures. Encourage a culture of process. Do not allow exceptions often.