Midwest IT Survival

A Single View of the Work is a powerful management capability

Well, what started back in mid 2009 as a few blog posts to capture a systematic approach to trying to get a handle on the various ways work requests come to a delivery focused team exploded into a 14,000 word, 13 part blog posting series on the topic. I managed three different delivery teams within three different companies within three different industries while this topic was being explored. The diversity of the teams, the size of the overall organizations (6 member team in 2,000 person IT department within 36,000 employees, 21 member team in 40 IT person department within 300 employees and 8 member team in 100 IT person department within 7,000 employees) and the industries (financial services, legal services and manufacturing) all helped to give me confidence to present the model described throughout this series.

Clearly the theme throughout this series is to use data where ever possible to represent all facets of the work your team is doing. In all three companies I received extremely positive feedback for the effectiveness of my approach from my management. Thus, I felt confident to share my approach with others in hopes others would find a way to adopt some of the techniques to enhance their management function.

Below is a brief summary of the key take-aways and techniques presented in each of the parts of this series in case readers missed any parts along the way or are interested in reading more about a particular topic:

Part 1

Starts the series by requesting you make a list of all the high level service delivery attributes of your team. Next, you are asked to list out the various ways work arrives to your team for each attribute that was documented. Additionally, if there was specific technology under the umbrella of services your team provides, document those and include relevant dates of version upgrades and version end-of-life conditions that represents work you know your team has to perform.

Part 2

Part 2 extends the list in part 1 to start to derive a model for how your team operates. You are asked to identify how much influence you have over each work attribute. Those attributes of which you have a high degree of influence means you are in a position to plan out the work. Those of which you have little influence means you are reacting to the work. For the attributes with little to no influence, you are requested to identify sources of predictive data such as historical request metrics and duration data to form trends. Additionally, you are asked to develop relationships with individuals and groups that are sources of work requests to assist in building work request pipelines.

Part 3

Now that a baseline work request attribute and influence system has formed, you are guided through the thought process of determining how much capacity your team has to actually deliver work. The familiar topic of an eight hour day doesn’t really mean each team member can focus eight hours on work requests is discussed to arrive at a data supported, more realistic number of hours per day to dedicate to service request work.

Part 4

Part 4 describes how to apply the numbers your collected in part 3 towards juggling high and low influences over the requested work scheduling. How to communicate this juggling by using data to your management and work requesters is also discussed.

Part 5

This part in the series describes how to take the low level numbers from the previous two parts and determine the true overall capacity your team has for doing work in a given time period. The excellent article on this pragmatic capacity planning by Peter Kretzman (http://peterkretzman.com) is also covered.

Part 6

Part 6 dives deeper into work requests that require some partial dedication of a resource on your team to a work effort and some of the nuances around safely committing to work deliverables knowing you don’t have fully dedicated resources.

Part 7

This part talks about how to integrate unplanned work requests into in flight work at a high level. Engagement models and other similar topics are also discussed.

Part 8

Now that the basics have been covered and a variety of work request patterns have been discussed, this part starts to walk you through how to build a comprehensive team resource plan.

Part 9

With Part 8 setting the framework for your team resource plan, Part 9 suggests how to sequence and represent detailed work requests. Additionally, having your team participate in the process as well as provide critical work estimation data is also covered.

Part 10

Now that the team resource plan has the majority of externally requested work represented, the addition of non-request work is covered. Topics such as “special projects” and “HR-ish” work is covered. What to include, what to not include and to what level of detail is the focus of this part.

Part 11

Now that you have a rather comprehensive team resource plan, this part describes mechanisms to help keep the plan from going stale. Additionally, how the plan improves your external perception as a manager is explored.

Part 12

This part extends your team resource plan to offer “what if” scenarios around the cost of working on a new hot priority request and how to use your team resource plan to assist with prioritization with your management and the requesters.

Part 13

This final part tackles one of the most challenging topics facing a team manager: how to justify a request for additional staff. The team resource plan is a critical tool in either forecasting forward or re-planning the past to use data to justify that staff add.

All in all, I hope you have enjoyed reading this series and found some element of it useful to you. I would appreciate any comments on the series as whole as far as its overall usefulness to you as well as any feedback around alternative approaches to topics I’ve outlined.

Focus on data to justify more staff

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, I described a few “what if” scenarios around handling competing priorities. This article will offer additional “what if” opportunities your plan enables you to explore surrounding team staffing levels.

“What If” Opportunities – Adding Another Team Member

Another extremely helpful “what if” opportunity is to show, with data, what adding another resource to the team would mean work delivery-wise. Every organization has a less than scientific way to permit team managers to establish business cases to justify adding more staff. Without data, a manager is left with less than optimal hunch based or eloquent prose based means of communicating the need. Now, with your sophisticated team source plan, you can either project forward or go back and re-plan history.

Project Forward – Strong Pipeline

If you have a more mature organization when it comes to planning you may very well have access to data that indicates what work your team will be tapped to do in some capacity in the coming year. This data will help you in presenting data to support your request for additional team members. Don’t fear if your organization doesn’t capture future work very effectively. The next section “Weak Pipeline” will help in that situation.

Create a copy of your resource plan and begin to add the projects and work requests listed for the coming year. Make some gross estimates as to your team’s involvement. Yes, there is indeed an art to these estimates. Involving your team members in this next year forecasting of work exercise will help to give you additional perspective as well as implicitly implicates your team members in the estimates themselves. I don’t suggest you go so far as break out your estimation templates and spend hours upon hours defining and estimating all possible details related to the future work. Rather, assigning big buckets of hours to “small”, “medium”, “large” and “mega-huge” work blobs is quite enough. Remember, your audience is your management team not the business requesters that will grasp feverishly at any dates available to them no matter how hastily concocted on a bar napkin. Thus, general estimates that can be plausibly linked to known work is more effective in achieving management buy in than overly detailed analysis.

Senior Management: “Upgrading FlimFlam next year is twice as much work as the FlimFlam disaster recovery project this year? Twice the planning? Full regression testing? Go live involves keeping the old version operational until all end users are cut over to the new version? Ok, twice as much work makes sense.”

Once you have the list of projects, using your new copy of your resource plan, start plugging in the project details using your current staff count. Next, make another copy of this future projected plan and look for skill set constraints and/or work completion dates that you know senior management isn’t going to be pleased to see. Add in hypothetical new hires with skill sets that significantly increase your ability to show a resource plan that accomplishes more work in less time. You might be surprised to see that the skill set you think you need isn’t as important as another skill set of which you figured you had plenty of capacity.

Re-plan History – Weak Pipeline

If you don’t have a strong work load pipeline outlined for the coming year, don’t give up hope. Take a copy of your resource plan from the previous year and look for where you had resource contention. Pretend you could wave a magic wand and have had additional resources join your team with those contended skill sets. Add in the number of team members you are asking for in the next fiscal/budget cycle year. Show a new plan from the previous year that indicates how much additional work your team would have accomplished given the addition of more staff. Your argument is that if you had these additional people last year, your team would have accomplished all this additional work. If next year looks to be even more work than last year then more staff is critical.

Next Steps – Weak or Strong Pipeline

Having a pipeline of new work for the coming year is a bit more powerful to present compared to re-planning  past year. But re-planning the past year is better than having no pipeline and throwing your hands up in despair and whining you need more staff] (external link to blog.brodzinski.com).

Pulling it Together

Lastly, consider adding some fudge factor for unplanned work that you know always pops up every year. One way to project forward for the unknown is to look back over the previous year and note all of the work that appeared out of no where. If you can articulate how you arrived at a percentage of unplanned versus planned work, you can apply that percentage to your next year plan. Make sure you can confidently explain how you derived that unplanned estimate that is based on a guess based on a whim. If you don’t feel confident you can stand behind your guess at unplanned work, don’t add it explicitly to your plan. Rather, just verbalize the plan you are presenting assumes there is no additional work hitting your team next year than what is already known. This conservatism will help offset any weaknesses in your existing projections. I’ve found that if you go into a meeting with senior management asking for additional staff and you have wild guesses based on wild guesses in your data, the value of the data diminishes to the point that senior management begins to lose confidence in your pitch overall for more staff. Rebuilding that confidence can be insurmountable.

Now, with more confidence based on your new plans, meet with senior management to share your reports:

Manager: “Looking forward to next year, I took the next budget year project pipeline data and based on currently known request scope, projected out work for next year based on my current team and their skill sets. What concerns me is that with all the business projects and their early start dates, the FlimFlam upgrade project looks like it can’t finish any earlier than the end of Q3. With Sally and Bob in demand on those business projects as well as the upgrade project, by adding another team member in early Q1, it allows the new team member to pick up some of those less complex business projects. This frees up Bob and Sally, and as I am showing on this alternative team resource plan, the FlimFlam upgrade project can start as early as late Q1. Thus, realistically the upgrade could be completed by end of Q2 rather than Q3. Additionally, these other business projects would complete months earlier as well since Bob and Sally can’t work on more than two projects at a time before quality is so poor and thrashing stresses commitment dates. That additional team member can significantly smooth out the spike in that skill set need for next year. Plus, we both know Sally and Bob have been in demand the last two years with work having to be scheduled around their commitments …”

With data in hand, this conversation is much more fact based compared to “I need more people because my gut says so.”

If you ultimately don’t get your staff add don’t be completely discouraged and give up on using your resource plan as a forecasting “what if” tool. If you’ve laid out the next year of work to your boss without the granting of additional FTE and people start complaining about your resources not being as available as they desire, you can take comfort that you made your boss aware. Thus, when his or her phone rings with people complaining because you can’t meet their needs, he or she shouldn’t be surprised. By presenting your boss with plausible data that he or she can’t support with more staff implicitly holds your boss accountable and you a bit less for the service availability complaints. Of course, you need to constantly look for ways to squeeze as much efficiency out of your resources and processes as possible. You don’t get a free pass as a manager to goof off just because your boss didn’t immediately provide you a new hire opportunity given your masterpiece of work load projections.

Additional “What Ifs”

There are certainly more “what if” possibilities you can do with your team resource plan. It can be very effective at communicating commitment deliverables and dates to project managers. It can help clearly articulate the schedule impacts related to multiple approaches to completing different goals within a project. “Adhering strictly to the architecture and delivery guidelines, these blobs of work look to start and end according to plan X. Being permitted to deviate from these specific delivery guidelines allows these blobs of work to be starting and ending according to plan Y.” It can help show what the impact is for doing certain tasks before other tasks to help others prioritize requests. There are many benefits to creating and maintaining a team resource plan. The next article will summarize all of the main points captured in this 13 part series of a structured team management strategy entitled “Single View of the Work”.

Drop everything and make project "X" the top priority!

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, I described how to keep your plan from going stale as well as the benefits to you as a manager for making resource plan a prominent source of data in all your delivery commitment discussions. This article will offer various “what if” opportunities your plan enables you to explore.

“What If” Opportunities – Drop Everything and Work on X

After all the work up till this point in building and maintaining your plan, here is where you can experience some real power of your team resource plan actually making your life easier. Consider this incredibly typical work scenario:

Senior Manager: The VP of Operations just told me the new FlimFlam upgrade project needs to start immediately and is now the most important project for everyone in the department to be working on.

Manager: No problem. Upgrading FlimFlam requires my team members Bob and Sally to be engaged to make system changes. I’ll let them know the new priority and I’ll communicate to the requesters/sponsors of what they are presently working on that their requests have been bumped in priority.

<Conversation continues>

During this conversation, by getting out your resource plan, you can easily identify what work Bob and Sally are presently engaged. You can share with your senior manager the impact of the priority change he or she is mandating. Before we go too far, there are some subtleties to this specifically structured response that I would like to call out:

1. You aren’t saying “No”.

Clearly, your manager is making a demand not asking a question. Thus, saying “No” isn’t an option just because it causes massive changes to your brilliantly crafted resource plan. There might be situations where telling your manager “No” is the right response, but I believe the majority of situations are best handled without a direct “No” as the immediate answer.

2. While agreeing, you are sharing the “cost” or impact of the shift in priority.

In a polite manner, you are agreeing to the request. But at the same time, you are sharing the “cost” or impact of what current work in flight will be paused and thus delayed as resources are shifted. In a non-threatening and non-confrontational way you are allowing your manager to get an appreciation for what work he or she is implicitly approving can be delayed. This subtle phrasing also allows your manager to consider if the “drop everything and work on X” is truly that important. You have allowed your manager to save face and possibly engage in a more detailed dialog around how to slot this new work in with existing work. In general, allowing your manager, the individual with the most direct impact on your paycheck, to save face and achieve their objectives as often as possible is always a good thing.

“What If” Opportunities – “Cost” of Working on Y

Another “what if” scenario that your resource plan can help you with is assessing the impact of asking resources to work on side or “special projects”. As an example, many times during the year pops up the potential need to know what features a new version of a system provides compared to the current. Another example would be a new technical capability that sounds on the surface to benefit your team but someone needs to dig into it to determine how much real benefit. Yet another involving software development teams is re-factoring existing code because what was put in production works, but really needs to be changed to meet standards/guidelines/ enterprise re-usability, etc. If your team is delivery focused, everyone is probably fully allocated to business work according to your plan thus asking anyone to put some time into a “special project” is going to add stress to that individual’s ability to meet their committed delivery dates.

Your resource plan gives you the ability to consider the impact of, say, adding some number of hours per week to a particular team member’s workload. There might exist enough slack time on a particular assignment within a project or work request to absorb those additional hours. If not, there might be the opportunity to contact the work requester and confirm that extending the delivery date by a few days is acceptable. Alternatively, you can schedule a few days/weeks of contiguous time after a delivery date for a particular resource to be dedicated to the “special project”. This way, you can work the “special project” assignment into that resource’s normal workload and delay uncommitted additional work items until the task is complete. This effectively treats the “special project” just like any other work request or project task forcing other tasks to be schedule around it. This gives you the ability to time box the “special project” with your team member so they can focus on this work without distraction as well as give them a clear end date when they need to have their work completed.

At this point, you have a few “what if” scenarios attributed to your team resource plan. In the next article, I’ll suggest more “what if” opportunities your resource plan possesses particularly around staff leveling.

How credible are you perceived?

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we finalized our Gantt chart listing all the external and internal work requests. We also added “HR-ish” activities and other categories of work that can impact delivery. This article will offer considerations on how to keep the data from becoming stale and how the plan benefits you as a manager.

Avoid Going Stale

Like any resource plan, it is only as accurate as the last time it was updated. You have put plenty of work up till this point in building your resource plan; don’t let it get stale. Consider making reviewing and updating the report a fixed agenda item for all one on ones and possibly some full team meetings. By sharing together with your full team you help team members get a sense of what others are working on. You never know one when team member will notice what someone else is working on and be able to offer some advice or alternative points to consider. If you are managing towards fostering a more self-organizing, self-directed team, which I’ve written about prior, this technique of sharing the resource plan with the entire team helps to communicate the broader workload. By encouraging team members to offer opinions and share perspectives on what others are working on organically moves your team towards more self-direction.

When it comes to updating your plan, to reduce the burden of taking notes then going back and updating the chart, consider updating the chart in real time with each of your team members. The real time update not only saves the burden of taking good notes and having good memory recall, it allows for immediate feedback and verification during your one on ones. Placing a copy of the report in a shared location for your team to view and update is great, but the additional value of making and talking through updates in real time can be exceedingly more valuable. Again, this is another opportunity to increase team member engagement through actively discussing what they are working on and capturing it in the plan.

Depending on your management style, the frequent real time update of the chart during one on ones could replace the classic weekly status report.

Management Perception Benefits

Now that you have an accurate and professional looking report of what work your team is doing, start to carry a paper copy around with you every where you go. Try and print out a copy of your most recent update on a large, single sheet of paper. Print a new copy after every major revision and discard the old copy. If it doesn’t appear clearly on the report, write the date of the latest revision. Consider setting a date range for the report of:

• Go back about one calendar week from the present date or the date you are printing.

This helps you answer questions pertaining to what transpired last week that impacts future projections. This is handy to be able to quickly respond to queries with: “Last week Sally was sick for two days and that is why her deliverable carried over into this week.”

• Report out a few months. Consider three months maximum.

Depending on the level of priority changes and work request adds/changes, you will probably discover that reporting out into the distant future isn’t all that helpful. Consider starting with three months and see how often you are discussing work requests that far in the future. The smaller your organization, more than likely, the shorter the future can be predicted. In truth, the level of maturity in work prioritization and forecasting in your organization will impact the frequency of report changes and the ability to project far into the future. The more mature the more consistent data available to reduce the frequency of changes to your plan. The less mature and more prone to “IT Instant Gratification” the more frequently you will be forced to re-juggle your resource plan.

By carrying around your plan and frequently referencing it in meetings, discussions, etc. you should notice a significant up tick in your external perceived management capabilities. Really? How so?

• Increase in perception of knowing what is going on

Sure, you might be able to keep everything you and your team is involved in at any given moment in time in your head. What is more likely the reality is:

As more and more work is being dump on you and your team, your brain is bound to get overwhelmed and loose details.

Thus, having a detailed report at your fingertips helps jog your memory reducing the chance you might miss something important in a discussion. Plus, when pressured to commit to deliverable dates, and what project manager doesn’t want you to commit to a magic date on the spot, you now have a legitimate excuse to pause, look at your plan, and then offer a more thought out response. Sometimes just the ability to inject a break in the pressure of the commitment exchange permits avoiding that hastily, in the moment, less than optimal reply.

• Increase in the credibility of your resource communications

Without report: “Bob is working on X now and should be done by Friday.”

With Report: Reviewing report prior to responding “Bob is working on X now and should be done by Friday.”

You are sharing the same message and very well could be using the exact same words in both cases. But, when you visibly reference some data prior to making your statement, your words are augmented with an increased incredibility. I attribute that increase to the external perception of being on top of what is going on and having data to support your statements that your resource plan gives you. Others don’t have any competing data, thus you have the more authoritative position in the conversation. The folks at Thinkshift Communications have developed a Credibility Quotient as a formal criteria for determining the level of credibility in one’s communications. As a factor in their ranking system, they specifically call out “Providing support for claims is the most important single contributor to credibility”. Sure, the corporate bureaucrats and smooth talking management pundits are able to talk circles around why something should be or needs to be delivered by a certain date. You can challenge back with equally crafted responses alone or remove the emotion and let data in your plan drive the discussion.

• Benefit of your responses having higher “stickiness”

The increase in the perception of you knowing what is going on and the resulting credibility in your responses nets you the benefit of having high “stickiness” in your responses. You will notice, especially in people that challenge your resource assignment or contention concerns, that over time you will see a dramatic drop off in the frequency and aggressiveness of challenges to your message. I directly attribute this increase in people taking you at what you say (rather than immediately challenging you) to the resource plan’s increase in your credibility.

At this point, you should have an accurate team resource plan that you have incorporated into your management work delivery commitment interaction discussions. In the next article, I’ll describe the additional power your resource plan possesses through it’s “what if” capabilities.

Consider tracking team member vacations on your resource plan

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we finalized our Gantt chart listing all the work requests and projects by work phase and indicated which team member is work on which phase with durations and dependencies from your team’s estimation sheets. Additionally, your team review of the chart increased its accuracy and improved your team’s level of engagement again. This article will offer considerations on what additional, non-external work to reflect on the chart for improved reporting.

HR-ish Stuff

The first non-external work data items to consider adding to the team resource plan are company holidays, mandatory “all hands” meetings and team member vacations. Basically, consider adding all the HR-ish stuff that requires your team’s time that results in the loss of the ability to work on other “real” activities. You may want to establish a threshold for the duration of HR-ish stuff to add. You may recall we calculated a real work day of five or six hours assuming 1:1’s, fire drills, performance reviews and other interruptions previously. Thus, you may want to consider a minimum threshold of a full business day. A single hour one on one still allows a team member to complete a task on that same day. Contrarily, a full day off-site “all hands” meeting does not permit any “real” work to get accomplished on the day the meeting is scheduled. Thus, creating a break in the work all team members are performing on that specific “all hands” meeting day reflects the real world impact of such events on your team’s estimates and work delivery. Once added, all work delivery end dates should be pushed out a full day. In my experience, when estimating work, technical people rarely think through the impact of such business event. They don’t always realize the need to incorporate these events into their work delivery communications and expectations setting.

Vacations

Adding team member vacations is extremely helpful from multiple perspectives. For one, it is a great single place for you to keep that information. Your company may already have an HR administrative system that automates the process of keeping track of this information thus this benefit might be marginalized. But if you aren’t fortunate to have such a system, it can become a real hassle maintaining and updating a spreadsheet to track this information yourself. By incorporating this administrivia into your Gantt chart, keeping track becomes just another step in the process of keeping the chart data updated through team one on one discussions, etc. For our planning effort, the lager benefit for tracking such information is in the improved accuracy of establishing work request delivery end dates. If another 40 hours is needed for a team member to complete a specific work request but that team member is going to be out on vacation for the next five days, clearly that work request isn’t going to get completed for at least two weeks. By adding that team member’s five day vacation as a break in their work on that request, the new work delivery date now is more realistic. With this vacation break clearly noted in your chart, external parties have a clearer picture on what is making the request take, in this case, at least two weeks minimum instead of expecting the request to be completed next Friday.

In summary, consider a threshold of a day for HR-ish work events and the following activities to be worthy of explicit Gantt chart reporting as material breaks to in-flight work:

• Vacations
• “All hands” meetings
• Off-site meetings (even if they are half days, consider the travel, etc.)
• Training sessions (full day and/or off-site)
• Sick days

Recording sick days can be really handy when a team member misses a few days of work and the ability for them to still complete their work request on the originally estimated completion date is infeasible. Additionally, as the weeks go by it becomes increasingly difficult to remember such loss of work days occurring in the past. This data can be critical to have captured and clearly reported on over time when the delivery date is fast approaching and requestors are starting to challenge the status of the work request progress or perceived lack of progress.

Special Assignments

Another body of work that deserves reporting recognition is the special assignment. From the typical situation:

Manager: Hey, can you look into what systems will be impacted when we start the FlimFlam upgrade project and let me know by next Friday before the quarterly project review meeting?

Team Member: Sure.

You asked that team member to do that work because it is important for your meeting. Now adding that request as a new single Gantt row of work accomplishes a number of goals:

• Records the request so both you and the team member know it was made and when it is due.
• Reflects that request along side the other work that team member is actively working on.
• Communicates to other team members what each other are working on beyond just formal request and project work.
• Communicates to outside parties all the work required by your team to perform the services they are charged with beyond just the formal request and project work.

In the act of recording the request you might (hypothetically) notice that the team member has a critical work deliverable due that same Friday. You have the opportunity to follow-up with that team member to remind them of their deliverable due dates, reset priorities or re-assign the request to another team member.

Again, you will need to develop your effective level of detail in reporting these non-external work requests. Your goal should be to strike a balance between overly detailed and thus time consuming to track compared to too little detail and thus requests get missed or lack external visibility.

On Going Assignments

You may want to consider adding on going assignments that don’t have a true end date to your report as well. An example might be investigating a new technology in order to consider its use in solving a formal work request in the future. I would suggest you put them at the very bottom of your report since they won’t change frequently. You may want to consider coming up with a unique color for these never ending requests. Since the time applied to these assignments varies, I wouldn’t try and update any work estimate durations around them unless you really want to enforce a team goal. A goal such as “spend 10% of your time investigating new technologies” should involve the reduction in about a half a day per week applied to all work estimates. This overall reduction formally allocates time for all to accomplish this goal from a work estimation perspective. Motivating your team members to meet their pressing external work deliverable dates plus invest time in learning new technologies at the same time is another matter.

At this point, you should have an even more accurate team resource plan reflected in your Gantt chart including all the major external and internal work items your team is engaged on. In the next article, I’ll suggest ways to keep the report from going stale and examples of the power of your resource plan possesses in improving how your are perceived as a manager in your organization.

Build out that Gantt chart

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we put together an initial Gantt chart that lists all the work requests and projects by work phase and indicated which team member is work on which phase. Additionally, your team review of the chart increased its accuracy and improved your team’s level of engagement. This article will build on that initial chart and incorporate work estimation sheets as well as additional work considerations.

Merge Gantt with Work Estimations

Now that you have a list of all work requests and projects with resources assigned by phases plus a quick team review, now is a good time to take all those work estimation sheets and pull the data and plug the data into the Gantt chart. But first, we need to make a few decisions around how to account for time in the day.

If you are using a Gantt charting tool that has an option for defining the work hours in a day, you will need to determine the total number of hours that reflect a true workday for your work requests and projects. As I’ve covered before in part three, realistically, an engineer doesn’t have a full eight hours in a day to dedicate exclusively to project and work requests. With team meetings, HR activities like performance reviews, 1:1’s, training, holidays, time off, etc., your real working hours in a given day maybe more like five of six rather than eight.

If you re using my work estimation template I referred to in part seven of this series, then that template has the ability to incorporate a calculation to handle the real working hours in an average workday. More specifically, the total hour calculations are raw hours where as the “duration” or “contiguous work days” calculations are where the real working hours calculations come into effect. Make sure you are clear on how you are entering your hours for estimating phase durations to make sure you aren’t over or under calculating the length of the durations.

Linking or Sequencing Work Phases

After taking a brief pause and stretching from the cramping associated with all of the data entry you have just completed, now it is time to link or sequence the work phases. Depending on the Gantt chart tool you are using, there should be a way to link the work phases you entered to reflect the workflow over time. Using our example from the previous article, the sequence should reflect that work requests get completed in the following sequence:

Planning -> Design -> Development -> Testing -> Deployment -> Post-Deployment

Below is an example from Microsoft Project that shows this example from above:

Your Gantt chart tool should have some way to indicate that although both tasks can start after the “Design” phase is complete, (hypothetically for example purposes), the Biz development can’t start until a certain milestone is reached in the UI development. Similarly, “Testing” can’t start until both Biz and UI development is completed. In this more complex example, UI is estimated to take a few days more than Biz even though UI started before Biz:

Pause and Admire Your Work

Before you start analyzing the results, first, step back and look at your first draft team resource plan in Gantt chart form. I think you will agree that you now have a single, professional and authoritative report of what your team is currently engaged on work request and project-wise.

Back to Work, Sanity Checking the Chart

Enough basking in your resource management reporting superiority; now it is time to sanity check your chart. Beyond merely double checking that all your “Testing” phases currently appear after any and all “Development” phases, look for these specific abnormalities and take some action on them to improve the quality and accuracy of your chart:

1. Do any of the same resources appear to be working on phases at the same time as phases in another work request or project?

If the answer is “yes” then don’t panic; this might not be wrong. It may reflect a resource winding down on one request and getting started on the next. But, if you have allocated a full “day” on request A and another full “day” on request B with one starting/stopping, you need to be sure that that indeed is the message you want to externally communicate. Please recall that the real goal of this Gantt chart is to “report” to external parties what you want them to see and understand about your team’s work. Thus, if you have been requested to work on two requests concurrently and the skill set needed to complete these two requests is contained within only one team member, then the overlap your report is showing is accurate. It maybe accurate but it might not be realistically achievable. There will be more on how to use this report to assist with rectifying this situation later.

1. Do any resources appear to have large gaps of unassigned work requests?

If the answer is “yes” make sure you have entered all the estimation data correctly and verified your start and end dates. This may not be an error. Rather, this may indicate that a particular resource doesn’t have any formal project of request work to handle during that gap.

Sanity Checking the Chart with your Team

Similar to the previous article, this is another great opportunity to get feedback from your team. As I mentioned prior, in addition to increasing the quality of your chart, you will enjoy the side benefits of over all increased team engagement. If your team is highly technical, asking for feedback might not immediately resonate with them on how this helps them. If you simply ask:

Manager: Does this look right?

Highly Technically Focused Team Member: Yah, sure.

You may need to pull information out of them through more probing questions or consider challenging them on specific data in the report that looks a bit suspicious. Consider:

Manager: Does this look right?

Same Team Member: Yah, sure.

Manager: Ok, it looks like you are working on request 7648 and 7653 at the same time and from your estimates, it looks like both will be done next Friday.

Same Team Member: I can’t do them both at the same time.

Manager: Ok, which one makes sense to work on before the other?

Same Team Member: Oh, I have to do 7653 first since I’ll tweak the solution from 7653 to complete 7648.

Manager: So you need to work on 7653 first, exclusively, and then you can begin work on 7648?

Same Team Member: Yes.

Manager: Great, I‘ll adjust the chart to show that.

Based on the above exchange, adjusting the chart to show request 7653 starting and then ending before 7648 will now more accurately communicate what this team member is working on when and at what date specific work items are estimated to be completed. Additionally, you can note the technical dependency the one request has on the other in order to communicate that externally to interested parties. Lastly, the team member now leaves that conversation with a sense that the boss cares to an increased degree what he or she is working on. Hence another additional up tick in engagement from that team member.

At this point, you should have a rather accurate, through team review, Gantt chart reflecting all the major external work items your team is engaged on. In the next article, I’ll suggest ways to include internal work items like vacations and special assignments that involve your team’s time with considerations on how to reflect that work in amongst the external work in flight to give a even more complete view of your team’s work.

Drag your team into resource planning

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we put together a way to capture work estimation data in a standard format from your team including the benefits to such an approach from a team management perspective. This article will describe how to use the work estimation template for more effective resource planning. I will describe a sequential approach to use the work estimation template data and build a comprehensive team resource plan.

Single Team Resource Plan – Building a Plan

In order to build a resource plan we will steal a data presentation format from Project Management called the Gantt chart. A Gantt chart provides a structured way to represent work break down structures in order to show task start and end dates plus the sequence of tasks with their associated dependencies and assigned resources among other things.

You’ve probably run across project managers on projects creating Gantt charts to a varying degree of detail and not immediately thought this charting could be useful to represent a single view of the work your team is doing. There are various tools, both commercial and open source, that can be used for creating such charts. With a the plethora of choices available to you I would strongly encourage you to leverage whatever your company standard project management tool is for Gantt chart creation. The value of using the same tool as everyone else is to produce a Gantt chart that style-wise is similar to others in your company for easy consumption by your audience. Alternatively, you could ask project managers you work with what they use. Also, feel free to search the Internet for “Gantt chart software” and explore the myriad of choices.

Determine Common Work Request and/or Project Phases

To begin, first determine the best mix of the your company’s standard project management methodology terminology for project phases (“Visio and Scope”, “Pre-Planning”, “Design”, “Development”, “Testing”, etc.) and assign each one a unique color. Below is a sample list phases I will use as an example:

Pink Planning

Purple Design

Red Development

Green Testing

Blue Deployment

Yellow Post-Deployment Support

Remember, the goal of your Gantt chart style resource plan is to easily communicate externally what your team is working on. The more similar the terminology to what everyone else uses the easier for your management and work requesters to quickly grasp what you are trying to communicate. The consistent use of colors for the various project or work request phases helps to easily and visually determine what phase a project or request is in at any given time.

Determine Unique Work Engagements

Add in any unique team work engagement model terms you see benefit in calling out. An example would be if during the formal project “Development” phase your team has a pool of people that can do user interface development as well as another pool that work on business logic component or service development. Try to use as close a naming convention as possible to what the standard project methodology uses. As an example:

Light Red Development – UI

Dark Red Development – Biz

In the case that you have people that can actually work in both groups, using my example above involving UI and Biz development, this resource reporting approach will clearly show who is working on what when. Additionally and possibly more important is the ability to conduct “what if” analysis when a higher priority request arrives. There will be more on the “what if” possibilities later in the series.

Note: One final word of caution, try to avoid creating an incredibly granular work engagement list. A very log list will make keeping the chart up to date a full time job plus it will detract from the simplicity you are striving for in reporting to external parties. Let’s face it; external parties are in a hurry. They don’t particularly need nor care to know your resource A is doing a solution approach review of resource B prior to a full team design review prior to a design committee meeting. They need to know:

• What is in flight at an extremely high level of detail.
• Impacts of a new request hitting your team.

List all Work Requests and Projects

Next, adopt a work request or project naming convention as similar as possible to the one your company uses. If requests have numbers, capture those numbers. If a project has had several name changes, use the most recent but consider indicating the previous names. Enter all the requests or projects you know your team is working on at present as well as all the possible requests or projects that you are aware of that might involve your team. This will be an on going and frequent exercise thus initial list perfection isn’t required. Over time, the list will become more and more accurate and comprehensive.

Enter all your Team Members including Yourself

Most Gantt chart creation tools have a place for entering in “resources” to be assigned to work. Make sure to enter yourself in the likely event that you will be participating materially in listed work at some point.

Enter Work Phases for all the Work Requests and Projects

Yes, now it starts to get a bit tedious. For each work request or project you entered, add the standard work phases you plan to track. You maybe tempted to enter only phases you consider important to reduce the data entry. As you become more experienced at how your resource plan is used in day-to-day resource work handling you may take shortcuts. But, if you are starting out with a new team plan, I strongly suggest to don’t cut corners just yet.

Link Your Resources to the Work they are doing

Now, for each phase entered for each work request or project, enter the resources that will be performing tasks on each of the phases for all the work requests and projects you entered. Don’t worry about start/end dates of phases nor the percentage of time spent on “concurrent” activities for the same team member just yet. I’ll offer some ideas for you to consider on the level of detail and effort you may want to expend in that area.

Review with Team

Now is a great time to have your team members check your work! Consider adding a review of this list at your next 1:1 with each of your team members. You might be a bit surprised to hear what other things your team is being pulled into beyond what you have captured. As a side benefit, you should experience an up tick in engagement from your team now that they know that you care more about what they are actually doing. Plus, they’ll see that the work estimation template exercises are actually going to be used for something beyond just mindless administrivia. By the way, if a team member reports they are working on something but they haven’t previously provided a work estimation sheet for it, now is a great time to ask them to provide one for the work they think is remaining on this unlisted work request.

Now you should have the start of a Gantt chart that captures all the request and project work your team members are working on by work phase of the request or project. You’ve also vetted your chart with your team and increased your team’s level of engagement. Look for the next article in the Single View of the Work series to complete the draft of your Gantt chart by including more data from the work estimation sheets your team is completing.

“You can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we developed some techniques to get out in front of the requests coming to your team. Now it is time to put together a way to capture that data in a meaningful way that will better reflect what work your team is doing and the impact of new work on in-flight work. This article will describe the benefits of using a work estimation template for collecting this information for more effective resource planning.

Let me start by commenting that I wrote and published the first six articles in this series around the third and fourth quarters of 2009. Since that time, I have been struggling with part seven in that I wasn’t able to succinctly capture a non-company, non-industry specific model that I felt I could share publicly with confidence. Thus, this series stalled at part six. Since that time, I’ve managed additional sets of teams in different industries and now feel I have a solution that is backed by personal experience and ready for public consumption and criticism.

The theme from this series of IT management articles is clearly that there needs to be data collected, documented and modeled to support ones management positions creditably and the ability to successfully commit to executing and delivering quality work. Through personal experience, the size of the company nor the size of the IT department significantly impacts the data model and approach I am proposing:

1. Provide structured and consistent work estimation criteria to your team members.
2. Collect that formal work estimation data into a single team resource plan.

Formal Work Estimate

Avoid the new manager trap of believing you and only you can make accurate work estimates for your team’s services. Force yourself to delegate that work to your team members. This provides a host of benefits, including but not limited to:

1. More accurate estimate based on the skill set of the individual about to do the actual work and not your skill set.
2. Gives team members a sense of empowerment and the ability to have an element of control over their destiny.
3. Builds a capability in your team that allows you to focus on things only you can focus on.
4. Enables more bandwidth for you to be objective in reviewing estimates and providing constructive coaching feedback to team members.

As Peter Drucker (or Robert Kaplan?) is famously quoted: “You can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Many technical people are great at executing technical work but they may not be so great and providing estimates for that work. Thus, one way to accomplish coaching team members is to sit down with them to talk through their original work breakdown estimates compared to the actual time it took them to complete each task. Helping a team member see where they can improve their estimation skills through data points can be extremely helpful since the likelihood future work will be based on current work is relatively high. Having that reference back to past similar work estimates contextually helps in future estimation exercises.

How does one go about creating a formal work estimation template for your team? I’ve recently written about this very topic of formal work estimation and provided a sample spreadsheet as a template for having your various team members provide data back to you in a consistent format for easy review. I encourage you to consider this article as a guide for the first part of this Single View of the Work data model and approach.

Now that your team is using a structured method for estimating work, what is the best way to compile all that data into something meaningful? Look for the next article in the Single View of the Work series to dive into how to construct a single team resource plan that builds on the formal work estimation you have your team providing to you.

"I just signed the sales contract yesterday. This needs to be up and running by the end of this week!"

In talking to others recently, we’ve discovered an unfortunate pattern across multiple companies where the partnership between the business units and IT isn’t particularly strong. When I say “partnership” I mean the level of collaboration on business activities that involve IT in some manner. Prior to contracts being signed, has IT been directly involved in the new business opportunity? Does IT have a voice in the major initiative delivery date setting process? Is IT’s resource capacity considered at the same time the business’s resource capacity is being evaluated in moving forward with a major effort? Does IT have access to the business’s multi-year plan? Are IT initiatives peppered throughout that multi-year plan?

There are a seemingly endless list of articles available on the Internet that talk of the need for a strong partnership between IT and the business units IT supports thus I won’t extol those benefits here. Rather, what can an IT manager do in a company that is taking strides towards but is still working on forming a strong business and IT partnership? Or …

What to do when the Business wants “Instant IT Gratification”?

By “Instant IT Gratification” I mean the corporate culture where IT is expected to delivery what the business is asking for, how they are asking for it and when they want it done all without collaborative dialog. Contracts are signed without IT. Due dates are determined in advance and IT is expected to meet these deadlines without being consulted. The results of such interactions between IT and business requesters varies, but the thematic results are the most frustrating:

• Sub-optimal technology implemented: Instead of matching the need with the optimal technology, the quickest/fastest must be chosen to hit the date.
• Many post-deployment follow-up activities needed: Instead of having a healthy collaborative discussion about all the “requirements”, only what the business shares is implemented requiring many “oops, we forgot we also need X”
• Inability to upgrade/enhance existing technical capabilities: always focusing on the urgent needs of the business without allocating a percentage of time to invest in more current technology assets.
• Work never done: Constantly jumping to the next hot request leaving only phase one of Y implemented from the previous hot, now cooling request.

What can an IT manager do in this kind of culture?

Anyone who skimmed the above bullets and identified with even one point knows these are cultural problems that a single IT manager won’t be able to solve over night. So how does one not pull their proverbial hair out of their head trying to get anything proactive accomplished in such a re-active business model? Consider some of the options below; just know that none is a silver bullet of success.

• Leverage the formal charge back model.

If your organization has a formal IT work charge back model, become intimately familiar with how the process formally and informally works. Employ the charge back model in every possible situation to ensure there is fully accountability and record-ability for all business requested IT work.

• No formal charge back model, then use time as the “IT currency”.

If no formal charge back model exists to leverage, then the only real charge back model or IT “currency” is time. Make sure you have full data based reporting on all the work your team is performing. When a new “hot” request comes in, update your single view of the work and present the new “hot” request alongside all the previous “hot” requests and ask the business to prioritize.

• Like it or not, get some formal work estimation model in place

If all the business requests “just get handled” then the business has no governor for making requests. Without a charge back model to where the business has to make the conscious decision to spend on one thing compared to something else, there is no barrier for the business to make every conceivable request to IT. One approach is to “just handle it” and try to service every request as quickly as possible so to not have to engage in any prioritization or work break down discussions. But as I have written prior, having some formal work estimation process allows for an intelligent, data and date based discussion with the business. When presented with duration and possible delivery dates, business users can more easily take low priority work off the request list. Low priority work can easily be removed once it is known by all what is consuming time and delaying the delivery of what the business truly needs in a hurry.

• Don’t blindly start working on requests, ask probing questions

From a previous article on my learning in attending a formal Agile training class, asking why multiple times (per the instructor, ask “why?” five times to get to the bottom of the need for a request) in order to dig into the real reason for making a request for work to IT. You will be amazed how many times the request hasn’t been fully vetted by the business. Asking why to get to the real business case to support a request will help to reveal what is truly a priority that IT is in the best position to deliver on compared to a frivolous request that if not executed, actually reduces technical debt without harm to the requester. Invest 40 IT hours in order to avoid a situation that happens maybe once a year and consumes 4 hours of the business’s time? Assuming all costs being equal between the business and IT (usually IT costs more per hour) , a ten year return on investment? It would seem those 40 IT hours should be invested elsewhere.

As I said, these clearly aren’t silver bullets that eliminate the challenges of a less than strong partnership between IT and the business units. Yet, by consistently improving ones capability to work with business requesters through careful implementation of the bullet points above, one can establish a level of credibility for your team’s services back to the business to better align the limited IT resources with the highest priority work for the company as a whole.

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly random sources of work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

You need to be out in front of the Business and IT

In the first article, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we used a great post by Peter Kretzman to build on a more complicated example surround predicting how much project work your team can reasonably accomplish in the future.

In this article, I’ll apply the same approach but to the “Projects requesting engineering support” request attribute which represents work scenarios where you and your team don’t represent the entire technical solution to the business need. Rather, you and your team contribute a portion of the technical solution to another group that owns the final IT business solution. An example would be along the lines of developing a software module that would be used within the confines of a large software application you and your team don’t own. Another example would be you and your team represent a shared IT infrastructure asset/service or application asset/service that involves integrating your asset/service with a larger more holistic IT solution.

Getting your team engaged when a business problem has been identified and another IT group has been requested to map out a solution that they may decide involves your team’s asset/service is challenging from a predictability perspective to say the least. In these situations, rarely does the IT “solutions” group pro-actively engage you and your team when they get the slightest inclination that a particular business problem they are aware of might need integration services from your team. More than likely, since they are under pressure to provide initial feedback and high level estimates, the required due diligence is cut short. The solutions team falls back on past work your team completed for a somewhat similar but never turns out to be that similar guesstimate on your team’s involvement in their half baked solution.

If you are reading this far and identifying with being more aligned with the solutions group than one providing integration services, then you probably want to focus more on the previous article on capacity planning. If you are identifying with being an integration provider, then keep reading.

If you rely solely on the solutions group as your complete end customer, you will always be playing catch up. Arguments such as “If you had engaged my team earlier in the project life cycle/design phase, we could have partnered to map out a more viable solution” fail to work for some of the following reasons:

• Solutions teams will prefer to by pass the “lack of engagement” discussion rather than participate knowing they indeed didn’t engage your team. What will they do? They will start designing solutions that don’t involve your team’s service. Since they control the requirements, the knowledge and the engagement of peer groups, they can orchestrate a solution that doesn’t involve your team’s service. If you start losing “customers”, at what point will the organization no longer see value in your services and your team in general?

• If a solutions team does participate in a “lack of engagement” discussion and promises to engage you and your team earlier in the process, what is the likelihood that that same team or more importantly, the leadership of that team will be in tact come the next project? You have achieved some level of “I told you so” agreement, but if the players change on the next project, what does that do for you?

• From a management perspective, how many times can you claim you had the “I told you so” speech with the solutions group to no avail to your management before your management will begin to wonder why you are stuck being reactive and haven’t put forth a plan to be more proactive?

So, your options with the solutions group seem limited. You need to provide them with engagement criteria, process and procedural info geared to get them to engage your team ASAP for new solutions. You need to have simple contact lists so they know who to call. Also, you need to participate in some level of “lack of engagement” discussion but with a partnering focus, not an I told you so focus as you run into lack of engagement scenarios. You need to provide all this so you can feel confident you are doing everything you can to empower the solutions group to successfully engage your team. In addition, since the solutions group is your choke point for information and knowledge, you need a strategy to get out in front of the solutions group to level the knowledge playing field.

Get out in front, but doesn’t the solutions group have the organizational charge to successfully interface between the business and IT? Don’t they have the project management heavy resource pool and skill set? Aren’t they the first people the business contacts when they think they need an IT solution? Yes, but as mentioned above, if you don’t make in roads into the business camp, you will forever be playing catch up.

How can you get out in front? Make a strong effort to introduce yourself to all the business folks that commonly engage the IT solutions groups. Bring a very simple and brief one page list of services your team provides, in business language not IT, to leave with them. Get them to spill their role in the organization (product manager, application owner, etc.) to you. Try and get them to share their product or service road map. Ask them about their strategy for upgrades, enhancements, changes in the industry that they are reacting too, etc. Your goal is not to replace the solutions group, rather, ask the questions you wish the solutions groups would ask for you but they never seem to ask. Make sure you stress you are not here to say the solutions group is failing, but rather, you are trying to help the organization, as a whole, better align IT services with business needs. I think you will find that setting the correct tone will open a flood gate of information to help you better understand how your services will most likely be needed in the future.

Now that you have some techniques to get out in front of the requests coming to your team, time to put together a way to capture that data in a meaningful way that will better predict when you will be engaged in work. The next article will show a modified spreadsheet for collecting this information in a metrics and data focused format for more effective resource planning.