Keep Urgency from Impacting what's Important
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Freedom from
Project Surprises Newsletter - Issue #37
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May 2008 |
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The
other day I was reading an article and it struck a note with me. It had
to do with time management and where we spend most of our time. Are our
days filled with fighting fires or investing for a better tomorrow? Are
our days filled with urgency or do we make time for improving? "I don't
have any time to do what I want to do", a common statement I hear
frequently and one that consistently keeps an organization from
investing in NPD process improvement.
Finding time and properly investing it makes a great topic for this
month. Please read on.
Jeff Jorvig, NPD Process Consultant
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NPD Process News
- A
revolutionary new web based best practices, work flow and document
repository
for enabling a collaborative NPD environment. If you want to learn
about creating a new level of team productivity follow this link. Learn More.
- Ever looked at Mind
Mapping for brainstorming ideas? It makes a great way to map out
concepts. Give one a try at http://www.mindmeister.com.
- Check out our quick
start instant downloads.
- Are your projects bleeding from unplanned
surprises? Take a quick read of your development
roadblocks by checking out our Quick Discovery Survey.
Leadership Quote of the month:
"If your actions
inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you
are a leader."
--John Quincy Adams |
Getting a Handle on Urgent Matters that
Run Wild
Here
is an example of misplaced urgency I am sure we can all relate to. You
are at the store waiting in line to pay and the phone rings. The clerk
answers the phone, talks for a bit and then heads off to go find some
information for the caller. Here we are, wallets in hand and waiting to
improve the stores immediate revenue numbers and the urgency was
transferred from taking our money to chasing a possible future
opportunity. Was that urgency transfer proper? What was more important
here? This is a great example assumed urgency.
How
many times in a day are you redirected to something urgent, something
that was not on the list when you awoke in the morning? I will place an
educated guess that it is easily in the 1-5 range. As soon as an urgent
matter comes up we will typically drop what we are doing and tend to it
immediately, leaving what we wanted to do drifting off into the land of
unimportant stuff. This is repeated each an every day.
At the
end of the day we have this nice list of fires that were extinguished,
tasks that we had no intention of dealing with when we popped out of
bed. The tasks that were on our planned list, the things that mattered
most, took a back seat yet again. Items that we were working on to make
things better tomorrow, once again did not move forward today. We are
drained, yet still lacking a sense of solid accomplishment for the day.
Is this a reality for you?
None of us like to operate this way;
we all want to do our best job and that means dealing with the
unexpected urgent matters as expeditiously as possible. As managers, we
take ownership of the urgent matters and drive them to closure. It's
our job to make sure these things are dealt with. Let me pose a couple
of questions:
- Is it our sole responsibility to own the
urgent matter or would the organization better served by delegating the
responsibility, empowering another individual to resolve the urgent
matter, freeing you up to work on what matters?
- Is the urgent
matter really more important than the task we were working on, the one
that matters most to the organization and ourselves?
- Should someone else's sense of urgency directly
translate to us without any thought as to it's validity?
The
truth is we always have a choice to make when an urgent matter comes
up. However, we are programmed to react to a sense of urgency by
dropping everything and take care of the matter immediately, leaving
ourselves with little time to do what's important to the organization;
the plans for a better tomorrow that never seem to get completed. It is
a choice between feeding a fire-fighting environment or nurturing an
empowered environment of continuous improvement. Upon waking tomorrow
resolve yourself to working on what's important, not just what's urgent
and see how this impacts your effectiveness.
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Invest
Time in Discovery to Realize Compressed Time to Revenue
Having
been successful in making the tradeoff between what's important and
what's urgent you now you have allocated time to invest in a better
tomorrow. How will you be investing this reclaimed time? I am certain
you have a list of items in mind that you have wanted to do for a
while; a list comprised of the known issues that impact productivity.
There
are changes we know that will bring improvement and then there are the
deficiencies that are silently stealing away cycle time, the unknowns.
If an improvement effort is to realize expected results, both the known
and the unknown roadblocks must be addressed. For those that have been
reading my newsletters for while, or have attended one of my workshops
the concept of an unknown is not new to you, although the definition
may still be a bit baffling.
 The
simplest definition for unknowns in the NPD process is that they are
essential activities or deliverables that are largely unknown to the
vast majority of the team. By definition they are unplanned and
untraceable, even though they are essential to a products success.
Essentially they are hidden and unmanaged roadblocks to your NPD flow
that will manifest themselves as unexpected surprises, spawning a
flurry of activities to "make things right". Interestingly, unknowns
also tend to be systemic issues that are repeated project after
project; therefore keen detective work is in order to bring them to the
surface, where they can be managed.
Investing time on important
activities that improve your NPD time to revenue must include time
spent on finding the unknown roadblocks in your development process. A
formal discovery activity is the best course of action and should be
the beginning of any renewal or reengineering effort for your NPD
process. The following three links will provide additional insight into
the discovery of unknown and unmanaged activities:
Discovery & Solution
Newsletter
Improving Project Predictability
(Chip Design Magazine)
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