At a number of organizations, I am observing management concentrate on the number of hours a worker has worked, ignoring some of the more important factors impeding software development.  The worker’s hours may be one of the most visible factors, but rarely the most significant.  Singular or heavy concentration on this by management indicates that the organization has a poor software development economic framework.

As direct or indirect pressure is applied to the worker by measuring hours worked without addressing product related factors, the worker will be pressed to engage in inefficient activities and context switching.  This activity further camouflages some of the important economic factors we really should be addressing.

We need not concentrate so much on the inefficiency of the worker, but instead more on the product. If we have no economic standard to order our efforts, then a couple of things could happen.  We work on efforts depending on which “HIPPO” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) matters at the time.  We stop and start efforts as the next important emergency trumps the previous.  We take in new work without finishing the work we already started. If this were manufacturing, we would see incomplete inventory laying all over the warehouse, visibly showing us something is dreadfully wrong.  In software development the inventory remains invisible.

Our greatest waste is not unproductive developers, but instead the wasted time incurred by product thrashing, poor communication, idleness due to dependencies, working on the wrong things and other product related factors.

Let’s start concentrating on these more important factors first instead of singularly concentrating on the more visible factor of how many hours our workers worked this week.