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Counting the Uncountable
David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Assembly-line procedures have vastly improved the efficiency of explicit work, but they tangle the machinery when applied to implicit work. Managers and knowledge workers don’t punch a time clock because their work value is not productively measured by the hour. So why are projects? And what are the realistic alternatives?
This article is a companion piece to “Percent, Per Se” (January 3, 2008), which questioned the value of measuring and managing projects “by spreadsheet,” and generated reader responses ranging from “so true” to “I have to disagree.”
Work-style diversity is not new. It’s as old as humanity. The reality of work-style diversity came into focus when Industry started employing assembly-line strategies that insisted upon people working like machines. It was amplified when we started using machines to measure the progress of people who were supposed to work like machines, but worked like people instead. While assembly-line procedures vastly improved the efficiency of explicit work, they tangled the machinery when applied to implicit work. Managers don’t punch a time clock because their work is not productively measured by the hour. So why are projects?
As hierarchy has flattened, more and more tacit work has crept into the job descriptions of every worker. Self-organizing teams, for …
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