Protecting Time
Make Safety a Prerequisite, a Modern Agile principle, challenges us to protect what we most value. On the back of the Stop Work Authority Card, we suggest protecting six things: Health, Time, Money, Information, Relationships, Reputation. I’m going to write one article for each of these six items, beginning with Time.
So why time? Why would we protect time, what benefits would doing so provide and what are concrete examples?
Let’s consider examples of what can slow us down and why it makes sense to protect our time:
- Slow computer: Imagine working on a slow computer. Every operation you perform takes forever! You feel awful because you could be getting so much more done! The slow computer is wasting your time and the company’s time and not helping you help customers in a timely way. You could be so much more productive if you just had a faster machine! In fact, I’ve known people who have calculated the wasted time from a slow machine and the cost of employing them each day to help their boss see that buying a faster computer actually saves money!
- Slow build: I once performed an assessment on a company that was considering getting help from Industrial Logic. I interviewed a ton of people over a few days. I found some alarming problems, one of which was that people would watch YouTube every morning as they waited for a build to run! What?!?! Yes, the build process took over an hour and programmers would run it every morning on their workstations. If you calculated the wasted time across this large group of people, it would be extremely expensive. In general, it makes good financial sense to speed up a software build.
- Slow implementation: Sometimes you think a task or a feature will take a certain amount of time, yet as you begin creating that thing, you see it’s going to take 2x or 3x the estimated time. Now what? You could press on but you’ll be spending much more time to get the work done. Does your sponsor want to spend time that way? The best programmers are frugal with time. One programmer I used to work with would ask me, the product’s sponsor and gold owner, what I wanted to do when he faced a piece of work that was mushrooming in size. A day or two into the work, we’d stop to discuss the issues and look for alternative ways to obtain the same (or similar) behavior with less time. It helps to roughly assess the ROI of something so you can gage how much time makes sense to spend on it. Imagine making a graphic for a presentation and spending 30 days making that one graphic! Is that time worthwhile? How will the graphic be used? Who will benefit? It might be worth or it might be a giant waste of time. You must decide and act to protect your time.
- Slow execution: It sucks to wait on slow processes, slow handoffs between teams, slow software, slow networks, etc. Within the last year, someone helped speed up the internet in our office significantly and it made us all so much happier! Now our video conferences work far better and things just get done faster! Employees don’t like slow handoffs to other departments, when it can take forever to finally get something done or resolved. Customers hate slow response times to problems, or execution of a solution, like a login or transaction that takes forever to complete. Invest in making execution fast.
- Slow meetings: OMG, people hate long meetings that accomplish so little. I doubt I need to write more about this. Keep your meetings short and sweet! When I see an hour-long meeting in my calendar, I often ask if we can make it 30 minutes? I’d suggest experimenting with shorter and shorter meetings for routine things. But do the opposite for really important group gatherings, when time isn’t the most precious resource.
While there are many more examples, I’m hoping you can see that wasting people’s time is costly. Protecting time is valuable. To do that well, you need to understand the value you are losing when you’re wasting time. Are text messages or social media slowing down your work? Are meetings interrupting your ability to get into a flow state? Are slow response times to users contributing to losing clients? Slow execution at work could allow a competitor to eat your lunch. Slow-cooked meals are wonderful, but slow computers or networks aren’t.
Be vigilant about how you use your time and what wastes your time. Make big visible displays to show speed or slowness. Work hard to remove what slows people down. Protecting your time, your company’s time, your customer’s time ultimately helps protect everyone in your ecosystem.
