Workload Management – Transparent Expectations and Performance

The Situation

·????? I was leading a team of, roughly, 200 engineers, designers, and program managers.

·????? The team was comprised of 5 different teams acquired through 4 acquisitions.

·????? There were as many cultures and processes as there were disparate teams.

·????? The 5 teams were in 5 different locations across the United States.

·????? There were 3 different core products and more with subcategories.

·????? Our work was a combination of new vehicle orders, projects for new product offerings, solving issues with existing products.

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Symptoms of Opportunity to Improve

·????? Internal customers expressing dissatisfaction over their needs not being met.

·????? Low morale on the team.

·????? Passive aggressive behavior between team members.

·????? No clear link between activity and goals.

·????? Long hours for high performers.

·????? People were “hiding in plain sight”.

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Explanation

I was Vice President. There was a director, a manager, and a supervisor on the org chart between me and an engineer. When I asked what an engineer was working on, the director didn’t know. We went and asked the manager, who wasn’t really sure. The three of us asked the supervisor, who couldn’t specifically explain what the engineer was working on.

Meanwhile, our internal customers weren’t satisfied, issues were going unresolved, and new projects weren’t being developed on any sort of a predictable schedule. It was clear to me that the people doing the work didn’t have a way to know whether they were winning or losing on any given day.

For self-preservation, prior to my arrival, Engineering had built a wall around itself, and their output was whatever it was, and that output wasn’t tied to the priorities of Sales, Quality, Manufacturing, or our customers. For some reason, company leadership allowed this.

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The Solution

A)??? I started by creating clear categories of work that was required. In our case, those categories were:

1)??? New vehicle orders

2)??? Projects for new product offerings

3)??? Solving issues with existing products

B)??? Next, we applied prioritization, as we understood it, within and between each category.

C)??? I met with the different functional groups to ensure our priority ranking matched their needs. This required negotiating between different functional groups and asking for leadership guidance if there was a conflict.

D)??? Work was assigned to each Engineer, Designer, and Program Manager based on their capabilities and experience.

E)??? I introduced a concept that hadn’t been previously discussed: Managers and supervisors were instructed to load each person on the team to 85% of their available bandwidth. There was no way to know whether they were truly loaded to 85%.

The concept was to avoid assigning work until all the work had been distributed but, rather, assign work until there were no available time slots available for the work to be done. Translation: Work required exceeded the collective bandwidth of the individuals on the team and we could only commit to what we had time to work on.

Why 85% instead of 100%? 3 reasons: 1) Stuff comes up you don’t plan for and you need time to solve issues, 2) There is no room for creativity if every minute is spoken for, and 3) We’re human.

Nobody sat around being unproductive 15% of their days, but they all felt like they could be successful, and they were enthusiastic to commit to expectations they believed in.?

F)???? We created a war room with visual management for each team member, each vehicle, each project and each issue and everybody was welcome to visit to observe or even judge our workload and performance.

Supervisors and managers held their team meetings in the war room to support the new commitment to radical transparency.

The Result

This forced the internal customers of our service to prioritize their requests rather than treat each request for service as equality of urgency. It compelled, not only, a conversation within each functional group but between them, as well.

People on the team knew how to be successful. Supervisors, managers, and directors now had a basis for assessing whether team members were meeting reasonable performance objectives.?

The internal customers set our priorities and knew, as long as we were performing well, if they weren’t happy with what were we getting done with our bandwidth I would be happy to join them to approach leadership to help explain how the internal customers needed me to increase headcount. My message was: as an internal service provider, I only need the headcount required to meet internal customer needs.

Team morale soared. They knew when they were winning. They knew when they were losing. They knew when they needed to ask for help.

The constant complaining of internal customers stopped because they controlled our workload.

If something wasn’t being worked on, it was understood that it was because demand exceeded bandwidth and we were appropriately prioritized.

Our department’s productivity doubled within 6 months.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this approach.

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