Time is Money

Someone commented on my last post that much of what I said about measuring the efficiency of engineers was applicable to other professions.? Project managers, program managers, designers and a host of other professions are all places where management would like to have an efficiency metric.? The feeling that someone is watching you and measuring you is not motivating.?

This is not a new problem and got me thinking back to my past, way back.There are a lot of parallels to be found.? My father worked in a factory that made cardboard boxes. The machine clattered along and a conveyor belt delivered flat cardboard to be stacked and loaded onto pallets ready for the next part of the process.? A lot of manual work was involved. And Management wanted to know how to make those workers more efficient!? The efficiency of the overall process was important of course? because if the machine was down that was even more expensive than a lazy worker.?

In the 1950s Time and Motion studies attempted to measure and improve the efficiency of these repetitive tasks.? T+M followed workers as they did their jobs and attempted to put a time on everything they did. T+M could even tell you how long a worker should spend in the bathroom (toilet) No pun intended I am sure :) ? It was 4 minutes in my fathers line of work in case you were wondering.? You guessed it, once workers knew that 4 minutes was the time,? it didn’t take long to figure out how to game the system.? Following workers around with a stopwatch was not be best way to keep them motivated

By the time I went to college, in the 1800s, the game had moved to “Organization and Methods”. Once again watching the workers this time with a view to improving efficiency by changing how their work environment was organized and optimized and what tools were available to them.? A simple example might be to have the widgets delivered to the workers at an optimal position to reduce bending or twisting.? I see parallels in this in computing. What is slowing down the software production line? In this case it is the tools and processes we look to optimize to bring product to production.

70 years on, history repeats itself.? This time, unlike manufacturing, the “widgets” of code we are producing are not uniform or deterministic. We can attempt to measure, though we have to be a lot more flexible about the equivalent of the “bathroom break”. ? What if I spend 20 minutes and emerge with a brilliant solution to a problem that has been blocking progress. Unlike the manufacturing jobs our brains don’t switch off at the end of the shift. Ideas and solutions can come at any time. Sometimes the right thing to do is put a problem to one side and go do something completely different, maybe take a shower :)??

More efficiency everywhere is still the name of the game though. The old adage the more things change the more they stay the same seems to apply :)