How many things are on your to-do list? On your team’s (virtual) board? In the urgent backlog pile?
The world may have overcome the COVID pandemic now but workplaces have a WIP epidemic.
Almost every client I visit – virtually or physically – has always had too much work in progress, WIP. In fact, I jokingly call it WHIP – work hopefully in progress. Human’s really aren’t very good at multi-tasking, the best we can do is time-slicing and task switching but that soon gets self-defeating.
This state of affairs has existing for as long as I can remember. The solution is simple – work reduction. Easier said than done, people are reluctant to do less. Reducing WIP requires focus, and that requires decision making. However, since the pandemic started, or at least, since the harder measures ended in 2021 things have got worse.
It is hard to not attribute the WIP epidemic to the Covid pandemic. Employers are piling more work and stress onto employees. It is simply not fair. And yes, agile – or at least a half-baked agile – might be part of the problem.
Every client I have seen in the last couple of years is overrun with work. Even though I am there to help people work better I feel guilty saying “Can I get some of your time?” because I know they are busy doing important stuff. Post pandemic people are still very worried about their jobs – all the talk of AI doesn’t help. I suspect people are more reluctant than ever to say “I’m full.”
Why is this so? – While I can’t give you any firm reasons – I’ve not done a proper study – below are some things that I suspect are creating problems but first and foremost, we’ve enter a vicious downward cycle.
WIP begets WIP
You see this most obviously when you try and arrange an urgent meeting with someone and their calendar is full for the next week, or two. You can’t get a meeting, you can’t move your work forward so it waits. Even if you do nothing it takes up mental cycles and increases WIP.
This has a lot to do with our post-pandemic, meeting culture. You don’t pick up the phone and call someone any more, you don’t wonder over to their desk for a quick question, you don’t bump into them at the coffee machine or go for lunch with them. You schedule it as a 30, or 60, minute meeting in their diary next week.
Remote working
I’m not saying no remote working. I’m not ordering you back to the office but…
The fact that many bosses can’t see how busy their people are, can’t see them running around, can’t see the stress on their faces, their full work board… means work just gets loaded and loaded: in cyber-space no one can hear you scream.
While some people are more productive in some tasks when remote working other people doing other tasks are less productive. The nature of the market economy is that when things get cheaper (i.e. more work gets done in the same time) we consume more of it so being more productive doesn’t necessarily help. It also means that the harder to do things, the things you can’t do online, keep piling up.
What few places have done is either rebalance the work load or learned how to manage effectively remotely.
Agile and “twice the work in half the time”
I often say: Agile won the war but lost the peace, I mean agile is accepted and many people are doing elements of what we recognise as agile but this hasn’t made for better work environments for most people.
In particular, someone decided to characterise agile as “twice the work in half the time”. As a marketing slogan that is brilliant but those who understand agile know it should be “twice the value in half the time” or “twice the outcomes in half the time.” Unfortunately it is commonly interpreted as “twice the output in half the time.”
Agile may mean you do more in the same time but really agile is about removing the half that is less valuable and focusing on the remainder which you can do more quickly because you are more lightly loaded so a) that which is done is more valuable, and b) it is done more efficiently.
Put this all together and it seems decision making is failing: perhaps because we all got used to sitting at home day after day we’ve got used to waiting. The problem now is people are waiting and not making decisions. All those “maybes” out there are still adding to our cognitive load, things that might happen. At all levels people are not deciding to forget.
This is yet another example of poor management: managers who crack the whip rather than work with employees to make decisions and find a better way.
Face with an epidemic of WIP there is a greater need than ever before to focus and reduce work-in-progress.