Hi again! I work for a start-up company that utilizes their programmers and network engineers in doing simple tasks such as MS-Office and PC hardware troubleshooting on top of the on-going projects that we have. This interrupts their work to finish the project. Can anyone help think of a system or form to monitor this kind of work? Saving Changes...
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Wayne MackRetired| RetiredSouth Riding, Va, United States
I would suggest stealing the daily stand-up meeting approach from Scrum (authored by Ken Schwaber, search internet or your favorite book site for more details). In this approach, a team has a quick daily meeting (approximately 10 minutes) and each person presents:
1) What did I do yesterday?
2) What do I plan on doing today?
3) What obstacles have I encountered in doing my work?
With this approach, one can get a good feel for the number of interruptions a team faces. By doing it on a daily basis, the number of interruptions becomes a good approximation of the time spent on interruptions. Having people try to record the amount of time spent is often viewed as busy-work and the numbers are often less than accurate.
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My advice is to do everything possible to eliminate these interruptions. They are incredibly costly to the project work. I find that the "switching" time spent going from the project work to other work is very large for many types of projects.
In one company I worked, we created a customer support team apart from the project teams. The support team got all the first-level calls, and protected the project team members from most interruptions. Clients were directed to call the support desk first, instead of the individual expert. This change helped a lot.
If you cannot do this, I recommend trying to measure your team member's productivity, rather than their interruptions. As a project manager, your main goal is to achieve project objectives, not monitor the minute-by-minute schedule of your team. Measure how much your team is producing. If their production is too low, figure out ways to raise it, including reducing interruptions.
I do like Wayne's suggestions, if you really need to monitor this. I have also heard managers ask their teams to keep a simple log or tick-sheet to quantify the number of interruptions they have in a day. Saving Changes...
