The Current Reality - Productivity Issues
When managers step back and reflect on their day-to-day struggles, they generally list a current extremely painful issue, ongoing issues they are addressing but find frustrating, and those issues that are a recurring struggle. The following list is regularly seen.
Team managers report that:
- There is little job sharing
- Our staff are often overloaded with a backlog of work, and some staff are always overloaded
- There is frequently pressure to work long hours
- Sometimes we struggle to fill vacancies, it's a competitive market for resource
- It's hard to get access to needed resources/skills from other teams
- Experts are always busy and have little time to support/develop our junior coders
Operations managers report that:
- Sometimes, we miss promised dates
- We have too many bugs and critical defects
- New features take a long time to reach the market
- There is a lot of product refactoring
Sales managers report that:
- There is a lot of pressure on sales to find new customers
- Our service levels are not as good as we’d like
- Everyone demands customisations
- Our customers shop around, a lot
Senior managers report that:
- There is not a lot of profit in the core business
- Margins are under increasing pressure
- Cash flow is under pressure
- We are suspicious that there is hidden capacity in our business but it is elusive
The drivers of these issues are complex and can be across multiple departments. These issues have been fought by people for many years, and been resolved many times, and come back many times. Many of the issues are not standalone, making improvement hard to sustain.
Watch out for the sentiment:
- “That’s just how it is here.”
- “We are doing the best we can.”
For most managers, the dilemma is something they have to live with. You did not create it, and it is a continual struggle to mitigate its adverse effects.