The Retrospector

I’ve been doing a lot more reading than writing the last few months. I’m inspired to write again today after seeing that one of my favorite bloggers has just published a book and released it this week. The book is actually a more formal version of his entire blog worth of thoughts, and probably more. Either way, I’m ordering a copy for myself and can’t wait to flip through it.The blog is Rands in Repose by Michael Lopp, and his new book is called Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager.

Stumbling onto Rands

About 6-8 months ago I stumbled onto a post Rands had that just cracked me up. Something about ‘What To Do When You’re Screwed‘ just made me want more, so I started to dig into the archives and see what this guy was like. I was hooked after spot-checking a few more posts about N.A.D.D. and Agenda Detection so I just decided to start at the beginning and read or skim through this guy’s entire last five years of articles.

Now, normally during any given week I’ll surf the web and come up with a bunch of great articles that I want to write about myself. Reading Rands’ archives made me want to just keep on reading to the point where I’d hear a little voice in my head saying “just go read a couple more of his posts, you can always write your stuff later…” Madness, I’ve never been quite so mesmerized by someone’s blog since I went through Joel’s a couple years back. It literally took me a few months to get through Rands’ archives, mostly because I kept reading even the stuff that wasn’t interesting just because I wanted to know more about the author and loved his style of writing. He’s got a great sense of humor and writing style, that I’ve found myself doing the same things.

Turning your blog into an opportunity

I wanted to give a little exposure for this guy because I really think the audience of this blog (yes, I still actually have quite an audience according to my logs) would enjoy his material. Secondly, I’d like to point out that this guy has really done things right by building almost a brand on his old net handle. He started a blog, let it grow over time by adding valuable thoughts (and plenty of other not-so-valuable tid-bits, but they’re pretty funny either way), then formally bound them all into a book that people can BUY (read: CHA-CHING!!!) and read. This is a perfect example of how someone can make an indirect income as a result of their blog.
Sure, there’s plenty of people out there that have published books about their related blog material…I’m sure they’re interesting too. None of them have ever made me want to do the same though. Not that I’d write a book about IT or management, but everyone has so much in life to contribute for others to learn from or laugh at…it’s a shame I haven’t tried already.

So to wrap this up, a big thanks to Rands for sharing his thoughts with the world via web and paper. (I’ll probably refer to him quite a bit going forward.) And to everyone else out there, take a peek at his site if you haven’t already. He’s definitely a worthwhile RSS subscription.

This post is the final installment of the 5 Steps to Help Your IT Team Concentrate series. The overview of all the steps I’ve covered in this series is listed for you here, with links to the previous posts, 0 being the introduction.

0. Coin a cool term for being fully concentrated
1. Identify how your employees concentrate and perform
2. Create a process where team members are most effective
3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total isolation for the individual time
4. Create the appropriate atmosphere
5. Don’t be afraid to change and experiment

Today we’ll elaborate more on the fourth and fifth steps:

4. Create the appropriate atmosphere.

Atmosphere in the workplace can be defined in a number of ways. I like to think about atmosphere in two different ways, the physical and the mental. Physical atmosphere is the obvious environment that you can see, touch and feel just by sitting in the room. I like to think of the mental atmosphere of the employee as the environment perceived after you take away all the physical aspects of the workplace.

Physical atmosphere

The last post in this series probably touched on the physical atmosphere that would help an employee concentrate more than I really wanted it to. What I want to emphasize here is that the appropriate physical atmosphere is not difficult to provide relative to any other job environment factor.

I stumbled onto a great article from Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror site called The Programmer’s Bill of Rights. The article is geared totally towards programmers, but I find it a very versitile list that could apply to just about any IT employee I can think of since most of them spend a lot of time in front of computers. The bill is pretty specific to physical environment factors that are ideal, if not essential for productive programming:

1. Every programmer shall have two monitors.
2. Every programmer shall have a fast PC.
3. Every programmer shall have their choice of mouse and keyboard.
4. Every programmer shall have a comfortable chair.
5. Every programmer shall have a fast Internet connection.
6. Every programmer shall have quiet working conditions.

I would probably add that some sort of barrier needs to be up to prevent line-of-sight with mobile people that are up and about or standing around that would distract the employee at their seat. If cube walls or something aren’t an option, face chairs toward a wall so that they’re looking at their monitor without a bunch of movement in their peripheral vision if possible.

Bottom line is, a one-time cost of a few things that are shadowed by the wages paid to each member of your team just make sense for the company in the long run.

Mental atmosphere

The mental atmosphere is a much more difficult set of factors to narrow down and adjust for your employees. Creating a positive mental environment can be achieved by taking some of the following into consideration:

1. Work to resource ratio. Are you way understaffed? Dumping too much on everyone at one time that they can’t possibly finish without loads of overtime? Keep expectations reasonable with what you have. Overstressing a skeleton crew will turn out even worse if you drive them away.
2. Good team dynamics. Do your team members work together well without any mediation? Are your members eager to work with any other members on the team? Try to avoid pairing up people that don’t get along, and most certainly remove personal issues between members from the department even if it’s at the expense of losing someone or transferring them. The ripple-effect of negativity is horribly bad for your team.
3. Corporate support. How much does your company really back up your department’s initiatives? Do you struggle getting budget support for simple items? Do other departments meet you half way to collaborate on projects requiring everyone’s involvement? If the support isn’t there from the corporate level, the motivation and departmental/self worth of each on the team can certainly demoralize everyone.
4. Interesting projects. Are you tasking talented employees with the same exact work day after day, or are you challenging them with needs that put them on the cutting edge of technology occasionally to deliver a solution. Who wants a boring job? Not anyone that wants higher salaries. Leave the boring repetive work to low-budget help or someone that’s not exposed to it. It’s more fun to get “in the zone” on projects that you have to really apply yourself on.

Basically, creating a proper physical and mental atmosphere for your team allow them to not worry about things that would distract them from total concentration. There are tons of distractions that can stem from the environment they’re in be it the squeaky chair they’re sitting in or the argument happening ten feet away about someone who told a joke that offended the person sitting next to you. Create the proper atmosphere, and you’ll get the most concentration possible from your team.

And the last step to helping your IT team concentrate:

5. Don’t be afraid to change and experiment.

This particular step is kind of a catch-all that I think is necessary as you try to find the “perfect” environment and methods to help your team concentrate. One thing that I can’t begin to emphasize enough is that every individual is different, and finds their best levels of concentration differently.

No corporate dictate on process is going to motivate your creative thinkers faster or better unless all of your employees are exactly the same. So in order to get the most for your team, you have to be flexible, and try out different things as the team grows or changes. Don’t be afraid to try something new and dismiss it if it turns out to royally suck for everyone.

Conclusion

So, to wrap up the series…I’ve described steps to take in order to help your IT team to concentrate. I’ll close with a request for suggestions from you on what other steps YOU have applied and seen successful. The steps I’ve outlined here have worked for me and many others that I’ve seen that needed to eliminate distractions and increase concentration. Hopefully they’ll help you as well.

This post is the next installment of the 5 Steps to Help Your IT Team Concentrate series. The overview of all the steps I intend to cover in this series is listed for you here, with links to the previous posts, 0 being the introduction.

0. Coin a cool term for being fully concentrated
1. Identify how your employees concentrate and perform
2. Create a process where team members are most effective
3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total isolation for the individual time.
4. Create the appropriate atmosphere.
5. Don’t be afraid to change and experiment.

Today we’ll elaborate more on the third step:

3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total isolation for the individual time.

In the last section, I emphasized creating a process that works for all types of employees. The focus of this post is to reiterate and emphasize the importance of what should be happening in the group and individual times allocated.

• Group Time

Assuming you’ve found the balanced process that works best for you, or at least have found one that you’re going to try out for now…it is very important that you encourage total collaboration during the group times allocated. During the group sessions you want to get the full advantage of having everyone in one place while everyone is in ONE PLACE. You don’t want to have to readdress the same issues later on because you didn’t fully cover everything, which could totally take someone else out of their “zone” later on by trying to gather up everyone again.

During the group sessions you want to:

1. Make sure everyone has a clear direction of what’s to be accomplished while in the group.
2. Make sure everyone has a clear direction of what’s to be accomplished before the next gathering.
3. Encourage input from every member without ridicule to keep the fresh ideas and variety of possibilities on the table…yet narrow the focus before the conversation is over.
4. Keep the energy and motivation as high as possible.
5. Identify dependencies on each member if they exist, followed by action plans of those involved to make sure things fit together nicely.

I’m sure there’s more to do in group meetings to make them effective. I’m not trying to list the all-encompassing group session agenda. I’m hoping to identify what will help your group sessions really act like group sessions so that you can also allow your employees to focus without interruption when it’s time for them to work alone.

• Isolated Time

This is the part of the entire series that I had intended for a single post. As much as I attempted to contain it within a post of it’s own, the other topics continued to jump out at me in more and more detail until they too were detailed enough to merrit posts. After all is said and done though, the initial thoughts have now been spread throughout the entire series leaving this particular part in its content-lacking state.

At any rate, the most important part of this series is finding ways to help your IT folks concentrate. The majority of IT people I’ve worked with concentrate FAR better in isolation than in a group. Some people may be more productive in groups, but concentration is definitely better when running solo. So how can you help your people perform better when they’re all alone?

Well, here’s a list that may help:

1. Give each employee their own space. That’s right, don’t make your programmers all sit at one big long banquet table in single room. Allow them to at least sit at their station without breathing down the next person’s neck. Especially don’t sit people across from each other without some kind of barrier in between even if it’s not sound-proof.
2. Reduce walk-ins as much as possible. Give them a door they can close once in awhile. If that’s not an option, headphones, cube signs saying “Currently IN THE ZONE, Do Not Disturb”, or a community “quiet room” where people can take their work with them and know they won’t be disturbed.
3. Reduce electronic interruptions. Encourage them to turn off phones, put chat and mail programs in another virtual screen or computer out of view. Some people have the ability to multitask really well, and their job may depend on their ability to focus on 10 things at once…but most employees I’ve seen do much better when they’re able to complete one task in the queue and move on to the next.
4. Make sure they are totally aware of the expectations, and that they’re equipped with the knowledge and tools required to meet their goals. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to wait on a reeeeaally slow-ass computer to compile your code when all you want to do is check that little conditional you changed. Minds wander when there’s nothing to do but wait. This also implies that your employee is trained enough to handle the job given. If they can’t handle the job, they’re probably more worried about what will happen if they can’t finish it than finding out how they could try delivering something.These are the main points, though I’m sure there’s some really good stuff you could add to it. So what else can you think of that would help in either environment?

The next post will conclude the series on helping your IT employees concentrate by talking about creating atmosphere and adopting change.

Tags: concentration, productivity, focus, IT, team+building, management

Today’s post is a continuation of the series for the 5 Steps To Help Your IT Team Concentrate. The full list of steps is recapped for you here, with a link to the previous posts in the series (step 0 being more of an introduction):

0. Coin a cool term for being fully concentrated
1. Identify how your employees concentrate and perform
2. Create a process where team members are most effective
3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total
isolation for the individual time.
4. Create the appropriate atmosphere.
5. Don’t be afraid to change and experiment.

Today we’ll elaborate more on the second step:

2. Create a process where team members are most effective

Not everyone on the team is going to work in the same mode of concentration, nor with the same collaboration habits. Some people are better off isolated from groups to be able to concenrate enough to finish large or complex tasks. Others are much faster at solving problems in a group environment where ideas bounce back and forth in a very multi-tasked manner.

Whatever type of team you have, make sure you identify the combination of collaboration and isolation that works for each individual. If you run strictly in one mode or the other, half your team could be ineffective most of the time.

An example

How I prefer things work in a team environment has a mixture of both environments in many iterations. I like to run projects large and small with some variation of this flow:
(Keep in mind, there’s always many other projects going on, and this example is for a pretty small project. So 1-2 days on a task just means sometime over the course of those days, not all day every day during that timeframe.)

Day 1:

• Brainstorm Session (Group - short)
• Brainstorm (Individual - day or so)

Day 3-4:

• Rehash ideas, narrow direction (Group)
• Initial design choices (Group)

Day 5-6:

• Agree on design/implementation approach (Group)
• Take tasks and split amongst team to work on (Individual/Pairs)

Day 10:

• Group review to reiterate tasks/progress (Group)
• Continue individual tasks (Individual/Pairs)

Day 14:

• Integration Session (Group)
• Release (Group)

Now, I’m not trying to define what a software lifecyle should be with this post. I’m attempting to focus on the team-dynamics of the workflow. A good mixture of group collaboration and individual focus time seems to have always worked best. If you can manage to schedule the group times to be short and often, the long stretches of individual time will be far more productive for some. Those that work better in groups should be paired up with someone else that works equally well with others.

The point
The idea is to come up with a scenario where you’re playing off of people’s strengths instead of assuming that some process driven by a company-adopted methodology will work for your team every time. If anything, take the company-adopted methodology and at least try to accomodate some changes to help leverage your individual team member’s strengths as you see it helpful.

Now I’ve discussed some of what you can do overall for the team. The next installment in this series will point out some of the more specific things you can do to help the individuals through whatever process you decide to adopt.

What processes have you experimented with? How many variations have you tried and hated? I imagine most of you have some combination of group and isolated environments, but are there many successful with just using strictly one or the other? Let me know your findings…

Continue on to Part IV.

Tags: concentration, productivity, focus, IT, team+building, management