Busy Isn’t Better
Editor’s Note: Colleen Johnson is one of the dozens of expert directors and leaders in the engineering space who shared wisdom learned from her years of experience as an enterprise Lean/Agile coach in 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know. In this excerpt, Colleen provides guidance on how to build a high-quality work environment that fosters consistent flow of work for a team. We’d love to hear from you about what you think about this piece.
As managers, we are asked to spend a lot of our time making sure that our people stay busy. Busy producing new features, busy fixing bugs, busy addressing technical debt, busy figuring out what will keep us busy next. We track our team’s capacity in spreadsheets down to the hour, trying to account for how much of each day is spent in meetings or forecast who will become available next. There’s pressure on us to make sure that no one is idle. Ever.
Some of this pressure comes from appearance. We don’t want it to seem like our team isn’t pulling its weight or contributing its fair share. Some of this pressure also comes from the need to plan and estimate. We are always looking to account for each hour of the day so that we can accurately predict our team’s output. Unfortunately, the closer we get to maxing out our capacity, the worse our output gets.
Development requires research time. I’m willing to guess that every engineer on your team cannot crank out code all day without having to look up examples or investigate their approach. This isn’t a bad thing! You want to make sure that they have time to explore best practices, understand new libraries, and dig in to new technologies. Without this time, your team will be making guesses and introducing defects.
Development requires the ability to respond to unplanned work. As much as we try to isolate our teams from interruptions, they are big part of the job. This is not just dealing with production issues or hotfixes, but also answering questions or participating in team meetings.
Give your team members slack in their day to respond to things as they come up. Without this space, your team will constantly be stopping work on something to address an urgent request or high priority.
Development requires a sustainable pace. When the amount of work your team has in progress changes wildly from day to day, we create chaos. The team sees a giant pile of work ahead of it and rushes to get through it in order to hit a date or milestone. Teams need to work at a pace that doesn’t give them anxiety to come to work each day. Without this flow, your team will be stressed out always trying to rush to “catch up.”
When we manage our team toward 100% of its capacity, the reality looks more like 120% or more. Our teams end up working in a state of being constantly overburdened without the time to do its job well. Team members feel rushed and unhappy with the quality of what they are producing and end up filling in their free time to do the learning that work will not allow. We add more to this imbalance when new requests come to the team, taking its attention away from its work yet again and moving the target on what is most important to complete.
Our goal in all of this is creating a consistent flow of work for our team. Flow from an engineering team’s perspective means the time that it takes for work to move through our system. Your role as the team’s manager is to build an environment in which flow can exist. Create space for your team. Give it the room to breathe; room to learn; room to respond. Provide it with room to enjoy what it does. You’ll have a happier team that is more excited to contribute high-quality code and can absorb new requests without smashing a printer.
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Colleen Johnson is an enterprise Lean/Agile coach, a speaker, an author, an entrepreneur and a mother of three. She espouses the importance of saying “no” and getting more by doing less. Outside of work, she’s happiest with her wild crew somewhere in the woods in Colorado.
