Managing Fires That Slow Down Projects

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Continuing Education for Technical Professionals

Managing Fires That Slow Down Projects

Gary C. Hinkle

Are constant "fire drills" interfering with completing your projects on time? It's common to have other responsibilities outside of a single project such as helping to resolve issues in manufacturing, helping with customer problems, and helping to put out every fire that's burning in your department. Often more than one thing is top priority, in addition to the big project you're trying to keep on schedule. What can be done to keep projects on track?

When people are swamped with too many high priorities it's easy to hand assignments to whoever is qualified and available instead of the right person. Take time to assess the work flow and the talent being utilized. For example, a customer service team was routinely depending on the design engineering department to help solve difficult customer problems, routinely causing development project delays. Knowing this was a problem, they decided to staff the customer service group with a small team of Escalation Engineers instead of handing issues off to the engineering department.

Another approach would have been to budget a percentage of design engineers' time for customer support issues, and take that into consideration when developing project schedules.

Sometimes we work on things that just aren't that important to the business, but because someone thinks they're important we work on them. An electronic product company was tracking issues for their engineering team to resolve, using a database and priority codes A-C, with C being lowest priority. Very few of the Priority C issues were ever resolved. Most just stayed in the queue perpetually. We suggested not wasting any time on these issues because Priority C items added little value to the business compared to other things that needed the same people.

Taking Priority C issues off their plate not only increased productivity, but also reduced stress because the engineers didn't feel pressured to get the lower priority issues resolved in addition to the higher priorities. Though issues were coded as Priority C, sometimes these tasks would get the same "fire drill" treatment as more important issues just because someone in the company made it their priority du jour.

Scheduling time for duties outside of the main project is a good practice, but do it scientifically. Don't use "fudge factors." A example of a fudge factor is, "Dave always takes three times longer than his estimates, so I'll multiply by three this time." This is not a good practice because Dave probably doesn't "always" take three times longer. Also, if Dave is worth the money he makes, he probably adjusts his estimates on new projects based on previous experiences. His adjustments might not be accurate, but he probably does make adjustments from project to project.

Instead, get to the root cause of the schedule slips. If fire fighting is the root cause then schedule based on the engineer's availability. Dave may only be available 33% of his time to work on the project because 45% of his time is needed to help customers and 22% is miscellaneous work that is essential. This may seem the same as using a 3X multiplier, but there is a difference between, "Dave always takes three times longer than he says" and, "Dave is busy doing other important work so he's only available 33%."

The knowledge of where Dave's time is spent provides the business with an opportunity to improve the situation, or simply accept it as satisfactory allocation of Dave's time once the situation is communicated and understood.

Time Allocation Metrics are very useful for identifying and resolving excessive fire fighting activity. To learn more about implementing Time Allocation Metrics, contact Gary Hinkle at +1 503 293-3557.