The Systematic Effect of Chasing High Individual Utilisation

Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash

Recently I tried to create a cause-effect loop diagram about the potential effects of assigning each individual to multiple initiatives (like projects). Why am I doing it? There are still lots of people in different organisations who believe that it will increase productivity. So here is what I created.

Disclaim: This is based on my observations and assumptions. So what you have experienced or observed may be different with mine.

To analyse any systems, we need to

1. First set up the boundary of the system that we are going to analyse. In my case, the system boundary is the software development area in an organisation.
2. Second, we need to figure out the goal of the system. There might be more than one but we can start from the one we noticed or assumed. In my case, I assume that one of the major goals of this system is to maximise the business profits.
3. Then we can start to identify the behaviours that we noticed and see how each of them changes the system dynamic.

Start Point

When I made my assumptions about the system goal and set the boundary, I started analysing the behaviours that were obvious to me. It looks like this.