The Productivity Factor
 by: Daryl Cowie 

Early in my career I believed that hard work was the key to success. Most of my first jobs were doing manual labor, and I was often complemented for how hard I worked on a consistent basis. The harder I worked, the faster we got things done, and so I believe that hard work was the key to success. After graduating with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering my first corporate job was testing and developing software that required me to be somewhat creative and perform certain tasks, and I did them to the best of my ability. I looked around and saw 30 other people doing the same. As long as everyone was pitching in and working hard I figured we must be making a lot of progress.

A few years later I moved into a position managing a team of software designers. They had been without a manager (and hence without leadership) for some time, and I still remember the day I moved into my new office. There was round table in one corner piled 6 inches high with a messy pile of white, orange and yellow papers. The papers were strewn out covering most of the table top, many just managing to not spill off the sides. On quick inspection I realized each paper was filled out with some type of product deficiency report or action request from various departments. I pulled the team together for our first meeting and during that initial conversation I asked them what they did all day. The answer I got was this. “You know that pile of papers in your office? We look through that for things that seem important or things that seem interesting and we try to fix them.” After a few minutes conversation I asked “So what do you do if you can’t figure out the solution?” There was a brief silence before someone sheepishly (and honestly) responded “We put it back and take a different one”

Was this a hard working team? Absolutely they were. They were young and eager and all willing to go the extra mile. Were they a productive team? Not on your life. Not without a leader.

In the days and weeks that followed I proceeded to measure and analyze the problem. Then I implemented improvements to bring direction to the team, segregating work into different groups, and outsourcing certain types of work so we could focus on addressing the key issues. Lastly we put additional controls in place to ensure open issues were being properly prioritized and closed with top-quality solutions so they would not be opened again, and to ensure people were always focused on the top priority tasks and not distracted or redirected from our new goal with tasks from other managers that did not drive towards our objectives.

Did we ever deviate from the plan? Of course we did. Business needs are fluid and new requirements come up regularly, but we recognized them as deviations and they were taken on as exceptions with the main objective always being to get back on track and address the backlog of open issues that were affecting the productivity of other departments, and more importantly, the satisfaction level of our customers.

It took over a year to address all the issues in that pile and it took a lot of focus and determination to not let other things distract us from that task. But everyone knew the objectives, everyone was working towards them, and everyone could see the progress we were making. We were working as a team, to a focused goal with defined objectives. And when that goal of eliminating the backlog of open issues was achieved, we all felt good. For that year we had been productive.

Having a hard working team is great, but if you want that hard working team to be a truly productive team you must analyze your goals, bring a common direction to your team, and find a way to get rid of all the things that are getting in the way of productivity.