Translation of "Henrik Kniberg"

How we got rid of reports on the work performed

The story of getting rid of senseless waste of time

Introduction

Have you ever had to work with reports on the work performed? Fill them up? Claim them? Worn with them around the office?
Was it like time spent well?

Statement 1 : Reports on the work performed are sometimes helpful.
Statement 2 : But very often nothing of the kind.

Story

Once upon a time there was a software development company and I settled into it as the head of the development department.
It was an interesting and cool job, but one of my weekly irritants was the duty to collect and approve reports on the work performed. Tens and dozens of reports, hundreds of pieces of paper. One of the concerns of the personnel department was to kick me in order for me to submit reports on time, and I, accordingly, had to kick my developers about it every week.
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It was annoying. Not only because it just took time and distracted everyone, but also because my job of “validating” the reports was basically a guessing game. I had no working ways to know if the report was correct. It was all annoying, but not enough to start fussing over it - I was new here and wanted to focus on more problematic things.

One of the biggest problems was that people “worked to death”. Many developers looked like pale casts; they were already in the office in the morning when I arrived, and still stuck there when I left in the evening. One of the key developers even managed to send an application for a day off for the upcoming Saturday. I thought that he had mixed up and entered the wrong date, but it turned out that he had been working all weekend for several weeks, and really wanted to go home at least for one day this coming weekend. An application for a day off on Saturday was a funny, but very effective way to point out a serious problem.

Why didn’t the Planning and Accounting module of the works issue any Vsmert Earned Developer Warning? If this module cannot do even such a simple and important thing, then what the hell is it? Imagine an airplane or a nuclear power plant with a trendy monitoring system that records all possible information, but never warns when something obviously goes wrong ...

Fortunately, I could see the signs of this Warning, and so, since I was sitting with the developers (And I was glad that I refused the personal office room I was offered at the beginning).

Long, short, but after a few weeks the main problems were already more or less under control, so I got to the reports on the work performed. By that time, I already had to do a lot of different reports, but apart from all the shortcomings from this, there was one advantage: for other wasteful procedures, there was no place at all.

Reports on the work performed did not just annoy me, I was curious. Why do we need them? Where do they come from and where do they go then? So I started asking.

My boss (CEO) said that they needed accounting. Accounting said they need the personnel department. The personnel department said that they are needed by the company, which we outsourced payroll. And so on. It became my background project - when I had a little time, I continued my investigation of the “Secrets of Reports on the Work Performed”.

In the end, I found out what was happening with the papers. After a series of transfers from hand to hand, they ended their lives at that outsourcing company, where each report was manually entered into an electronic personnel registration system.
Hmm ...



Mdaaaaaaa ...

Well, that is, I mean, in general, this is not very effective.

Being an IT geek in my heart, I immediately began to think about how to simplify the process. So, each developer can fill in his work online, their local lead also looks at all the reports online and presses Ok to approve them, then I look at the high-level results and press Ok to accept them and all this is sent by the outsourcing company. Wow, everything is pretty smooth. Hmm, can this system be connected to Eclipse so that it automatically logs the time in the work performed, depending on which development project is open on the computer? Maybe we can immediately integrate directly with the system of personnel records that an outsourcing company uses? It is likely to fall well on the SOA ...
Wait.

“There is nothing more useless than doing effectively what you don’t need to do at all.”
- Peter Drucker

I reminded myself that my initial question was the effectiveness of the reports on the work performed, and not their performance (Efficency).

• Performance - the ratio of the output of the system to its input.
  Example: The number of lines of code per hour.
• Efficiency - the quality of the ability to bring the desired results.
  Example: ROI per release.

I still did not know what the reports on the work performed were used for. The answers I received were often something stupid like “we have to fill in the work done, because this is our standard” (that is, like “we have to because we have to”). What they just did not tell me about the reports on the work performed, but what I really wanted to know was why we needed these figures.

So I started asking questions differently. Instead of asking “Why reports on completed work are needed,” I began to ask, “What happens if we“ lose ”the reports” or “What happens if we“ inadvertently "generate the contents of the reports randomly."

As a result, the real purpose of the reports surfaced. The main thing for which they were used - to calculate how much to pay compensation for processing. There were other goals, but they were already covered by other reports. So the only important goal was to pay for processing. And, they were also needed to calculate “flex time”, a tradition of the Swedish industry, which, in fact, allows people to come to work sometimes later, if on another day they came early. Work reports were used to confirm that everything stacks at least 40 hours a week + X, where X is overtime.

The sweet taste of truth.

Now, armed with Truth, I gathered a few developers and asked them a rhetorical question - “Do you like filling out reports on the work performed”? The expression on their faces was the answer I needed:



Then I continued like this:

“Now we use these reports to count overtime. But filling out reports is sad, and working overtime is even sadder. We all know that one hour of energetic, motivated, focused development is better than a whole week of zombie coding. ”

(Offhand, I don’t remember any specific links, well, I’ve already lost count of research that shows that the relationship between the length of the working week and the value produced is small or not, at least when it comes to creative work such as developing software. and focus, not hours).

“So what is the proposal. No more reports. And no more overtime. Starting today, Overtime means “Work when you don’t want.” If you are demotivated or tired, go home. If you want to linger and guide because you are “in the flow” - linger. This is not overtime. If you feel that you have worked late several days - take a day off. If the week was slow - catch up on Saturday, if you want. Find your rhythm, find the rhythm of your team. ”

“Of course, sometimes there may be exceptions. In such cases, the traditional processing compensation system will work. We will try to minimize such cases and deal with them in each individual case. If in doubt, call me. ”

"Manage for the normal and treat exceptions as exceptional"
- Edwards Deming

“And finally. I don't care how many hours a week you’ll work out, as long as it roughly corresponds to the standard full-time job. I care that you are focused and motivated when you work. Can I trust you to take this responsibly? ”

Everyone nods enthusiastically.

I gathered courage, went to the CEO, and told him that we would no longer send reports on the work performed. The dialogue went something like this:

I: "We will no longer send reports on the work performed"
CEO: "Why?"
Me: "It's a waste of time."
CEO: "And the personnel department will not be upset?"
I: "I will give them what they need in a more efficient way."
CEO: "Ok, cool."
Wow, that was easier than I expected. I got ready for various questions ... I liked that CEO: o)
Then I went to the frames.
Me: "We will no longer send reports on the work performed."
Frames: “But you have to. That is the standard! ”
I: “The standard is changing, I just talked with the CEO” (Well, yes, I lied a little, I admit).
Personnel: “How do we know now how much to pay people?”
I: “You have labor contracts for everyone. Just pay everyone their normal monthly salary. ”
Frames: "What about overtime?"
I: “He will be almost no more. If so, I will let you know. The rest of the time, count 40 hours a week. ”
Personnel: “But we don’t want to change our procedures and standards, maybe you’ll just send reports as before?”
I: “I can have them be generated automatically with 40 hours a week and automatically sent to you by mail every week. You need it?"
Frames: "Hmm, it turns out pretty stupid."
I: “Well then, I will not send them. If you want to. You can assume that you receive from us a pack of 40-hour reports, and enter it all into the system, as you usually do. We will dirty the paper less, and you will no longer have to kick me for late reports. ”
Frames: “Ok, quite fair, let's try.”
No one else stuttered about the reports on the work performed.

Moral of the story

1. Many organizations uselessly spend a lot of time on executing any procedures prescribed by the standards - various useless rules, practices and procedures. Take a fresh look at this. Take it positively - these are good opportunities for improvement.
2. Even the most useless procedure at first glance, we have a purpose.
3. If you meet resistance to rejecting a useless procedure, find its reason. Find out what need this procedure closes. Suggest a less costly and useless way to close this need.
4. Be persistent. It takes time to eliminate the procedure that is deeply ingrained into the organization.
5. Do not blame the predecessors who introduced this procedure. Most likely, it was a good solution for a real problem in the past. Although it could not be. In general, this is not important, focus on the future.
   “Things are not the way they got that way” - Jerry Weinberg
6. Do not confuse efficiency with performance. Focus first on efficiency, and then on performance.
7. An hour is a measure of effort, not a measure of value.

FAQ

After this, as there was no overtime, did it not lead to the fact that you have less time to do

Well, this led to less code being written. Less Bad Code. Less important code. Less trash. And therefore, less time is spent on catching bugs, on answering panic calls to the support service when the system has crumbled, on supporting a list of bugs, on issuing patches and on decrypting a curved code.

And that means more time to write Good Code.

We all noticed a clear and noticeable improvement in productivity after giving up overtime. Productivity in terms of user value per unit of time.

Didn't you ever need to take into account the time worked anymore?

Oh, sometimes there are quite correct reasons for what you need to know how much time is spent on a particular project, for example, if there is an external client who needs to be billed. But it is easy to do, and without reports on the work performed. If one team of 8 people spent 3 sprints working on project X, and each sprint took 2 weeks, then we can roughly assume that 8 people worked a full day 3 × 2 weeks. Total 40 hours x 6 weeks x 8 people = 1920 hours. True, it may be that they spend part of their time on supporting product Y at the same time. In this case, at each retrospective, I ask the team to estimate approximately what percentage of the time they were involved in project Y, for example, 80% / 20%. It is quite easy to take this into account in calculations.

Some teams do this every day - before going home, each member of the team puts a mark on the chart on the board, roughly distributing their time per day for different jobs. This gives even greater accuracy, at the same time at low cost.

However, I would be more careful here. Multitasking is usually a very bad idea. If we have to make a complex system in order to take into account exactly how people allocate their time to projects, then we are definitely not focused on that - we have to correct the problem (working at once with too many projects in parallel), and not a symptom ).

Suppose I spent Monday working on four different projects, 2 hours over each, 8 hours in total. I will mark 2 hours for each project in the accounting system for completed work, but with all these “context switches” the effective time will most likely be closer to 30-60 minutes per project. So most of the day is wasted.

A time tracking system that spends a waste of time is itself a waste of time.
If everyone works only on one project at a time, then we learn the work done to become trivial.

Doesn't it happen that some developers stopped getting a lot of money for overtime?

I raised wages so that the compensation for overtime is no longer a driving force. The increase was significant in many cases. Nobody complained about it, no one offered to switch to the old system.

Studies show that monetary incentives can make productivity worse, not better, when it comes to such complex and creative work as software development. Instead, just pay people enough that they don’t think about money. Here is a short and very cool presentation on this topic, must-see, - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

Paying people for overtaking was one of the most stupid things of all, it just gave us very tired developers and “technical debt” (a lot of curved code, shortcomings, etc., set aside for later)

What happened next?

I wrote a book called Scrum and XP from the Trenches. To my surprise, she became very popular in the developer community (I wrote it more for myself just to put all my thoughts on paper) and since then I have already lost count of people from all over the world who told me that my book inspired change them how they organize their software development process. Very cool, thanks for the feedback!

This article is just another side of that story. The most important thing is that we could never do what we did if we didn’t continue to constantly aggressively remove all the waste of time we encountered (reports on the work performed were only one example). Hmm ... why did the word “Lean” immediately pop up in my head? : o)

It was all in 2006. Since then, I have never touched or filled in any table with a clock — even though I have been consulting for the last 4 years. If a future client raises this question, then I will recognize his real need and find an alternative way to close it.