How To Better Manage Resources:
See Fred Shrink Overtime

by Bill Flury

What’s the Problem with Fred?

There are some people for whom 24 hour days seem to be too short. They can’t get done all the things they have to do or should be doing within the time available. They work hard and long, eat at their desks while they work and sleep less than Mom always told them they should. Even with all that, they still can’t get everything done when they need to. Are they just slow or are they trying to do too much?

Fred is one of those people. He is a member of a small group of technical experts who design and build specialized products that include both hardware and software. Fred is a “super coder,” a very special kind of computer programmer.

The computer code that Fred writes is a key part of most of the active projects in his workgroup. He comes to work early and leaves very late most days and his output is always perfect.

If you ask Fred to do something he will always agree to take it on and he will add it to his list. Fred usually has at least eight or nine things on his personal “To Do” list on his computer. Fred’s list is organized by “When Requested.”  Every morning Fred comes in and looks at his list on his computer and gets to work on the next item on the list. Fred works on the items as fast as he can and turns out a huge amount of work.

Tasking Fred

New requirements come in daily from the group’s customers. Some of these are new requirements for new products and others are modifications of requirements for products already in progress. The group usually has about 15 such projects going at any one time. It is vital for these products to be available at the time they are scheduled to be delivered.

There are three team leaders in the group. Each one manages several active projects. When one of them needs something from Fred for one of his projects, he figures out what he needs and then discusses it with Fred. Fred estimates how long it will take and they agree on that. Then, Fred enters the task on his list in his computer.

As we all know, project managers always consider the tasks in their projects to be the most important, and the most urgent. An old saying about that has been translated into many languages. One of the more colorful versions is: “Every monkey in the eyes of his mother is a gazelle.” Every project leader tells Fred that his task (his monkey) is the most critical. So, each task joins Fred’s queue of baby gazelles on his list. As far as Fred knows, all of the tasks are “urgent, important, and needed as soon as possible,” so he works on them as fast as he can.

But recently, several of the projects missed deadlines and the managers whose projects were late were saying that they had been held up by Fred’s stuff.

Is Fred The Problem?

The number of missed deadlines was a serious problem. The project managers got together to see what they had to do to fix it. They had to figure out how to get Fred’s work when they needed it to complete their projects on schedule.

Fred was very productive. Fred was already working a lot of overtime and they did not want to work him any harder. They thought about getting more Freds. However, Fred’s skills were truly unique, so that option was out. All the things Fred was tasked to do he could get done – eventually.

Making Fred’s Schedule Visible

All of the project leads were assuming that Fred was doing what they had asked him to do and would have it done when they needed it. None of them had any idea of what other work was on Fred’s list.

So, they asked Fred to print out his list. (He called it “Fred’s Sked.”) Fred’s list on the computer was in order of when he was asked to do each task. The list showed eight tasks requested by the three project leaders, totaling an estimated 170 hours of work.

To get a different look, the project leaders asked Fred to sort the list by due date, with the nearest dates at the top. That view revealed the problem. They saw that some of the things Fred was working on really weren’t needed right away, and others, farther down his list, were needed yesterday.

There was an overall project schedule posted and maintained for all of the projects. Each project manager managed his own project’s schedules and pressed to get the work done on time to meet the overall project schedule. However, when they looked at the problem all together they realized that there was no coordinated schedule for the one critical item that affected almost every project – the various tasks they had asked Fred to accomplish.

Now All Could See

Now, for the first time, they could all see what tasks Fred was working on to try to meet the deadlines. It was very clear that Fred was way overbooked. The 170 hours on Fred’s Sked was needed for various deadlines over the next several weeks. However, 74 hours of that work was due this week and 52 hours of work that the project managers wanted needed to be done by the end of the next week. And, there would still be a 44 hour week for Fred in the third week even if no more requests came in.

This was an eye-opener for the project leads and for Fred. Fred already knew he was taking on too much but he didn’t think it was his place to tell a project manager that he had to change his schedule. His job was to just get all the work done as fast as he could.

Aha! – The Problem Isn’t Fred

The project managers could clearly see that there were not enough hours in Fred’s work week (and overtime) to do all the requested work for each week. They were overbooking him. They could also see that the problem was not Fred – they were the problem. They had to do something.

They concluded that the real problem was that, until now, they had not been able to see the whole picture of what they were asking Fred to do. They agreed that they and Fred needed a simple method to keep Fred’s schedule visible, to support the orderly negotiations of deadlines. They figured that the “Fred’s Sked” spreadsheet, sorted by due date, would serve that purpose.

The project managers asked Fred to keep the current version of Fred’s Sked posted on the outside wall of his cubicle where they could consult it regularly and coordinate their requirements for Fred’s work with the other project managers.

In most cases, since Fred started posting the active copy of Fred’s Sked, the project managers have found ways to adjust their individual project schedules in ways to smooth out Fred’s workload. However, in a few cases they have had to go back to their customers and ask for some schedule relief. In those cases, they have been able to argue strongly on the basis that it is truly necessary to preserve the health of their most critical resource: Fred.

So, It Wasn’t Fred

The problem was a visibility problem. Before Fred’s time commitments were posted, the project managers had no way of knowing that they had a scheduling problem. Printing out and posting the current version of the Fred Sked on the portal of Fred’s cubicle has enabled the project managers to see potential scheduling issues and resolve them before they become a problem.

Happy Ending

Fred now works pretty normal hours and the group is not missing deadlines anymore.

In your experience, what are other methods for working successfully with shared resources?

 

Note: This story comes from Bill’s book, WYSIWYG Tales: See What You Do. The book presents several real-life stories about simple ways to visualize what you do, so that you can improve the way you do it.