Information Technology Isn’t Empowering, Using It To Change Things Is
The team’s best hope for staying on schedule is to anticipate problems and fix them before they occur. To do that, managers from Lockheed and its partner companies, Northrop and BAE, undertook an ambitious postmortem: They compiled an exhaustive database of setbacks and lessons learned on virtually all of the world’s modern tactical–aircraft development programs. Then they did a premortem: They plotted their lessons–learned analysis on a graph that runs from 2001 to 2011. The graph enabled them to identify 10 future inflection points — dates when the risk of a setback runs high.
—High Stakes, Big Bets by Bill Breen photographs by Randy Harris (Fast Company issue 57, page 66)First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite untrue, i.e., that all will go well.
Second, our estimatiing techniqes fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable.
—The Mythical Man–Month Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., p14. (1995 Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.)
Want a recipe for technology induced stress? Develop scheduling software which blocks out time for a meeting, but doesn’t empower meeting effectiveness. Data about how long the meeting is scheduled to take will not give you the information necessary for shortening or eliminating the meeting. Persuasive design of scheduling software can help.
An example that illustrates this is the Meeting Meter developed by Bernie Dekoven’s Institute for Better Meetings in Palo Alto, California. By any measure other than business effectiveness it’s not worth mentioning. Basically a taxi meter for meetings, it tallies up the cost of the salaries of attendees, and other hidden expenses of the company meeting. These costs mount up, minute by minute, as the meeting drags on. When the costs of the meeting total more than the expected payoff from the topic discussed, a bell goes off …as well it should.
According to Dekoven, when you use the computer to quantify and display the true cost of meetings, interesting things happen. One company realizes a big chunk of meeting costs were expended just waiting for everybody to show up. Another may finally realize the true costs of micro management and turf protection, and begin to delegate. As someone who has been written up in Business Week, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and Inc. Magazine, Dekoven’s ideas could help developers of scheduling software empower users with some measure of control over their time. Captology design could turn scheduling software from a passive log to active design tool of the user’s schedule.
Empowering The User
The main goal of almost all users of group calendaring software is to avoid needless, unproductive meetings, yet the number–one task performed by almost all of that software is to create meetings. This contradiction, where the user’s goals and the program’s tasks are in direct opposition is symptomatic of the failure of our current design methods to work effectively. What’s more, this contradiction is found almost universally in our software, regardless of its type.
—Goal–Directed Design by Alan Cooper
Scheduling and project management software affords the user little of the fabled empowerment promised by information technology. Designed a little differently, technology could be a persuasive tool for decision allocation, and to relate tasks to larger objectives. Measure your schedule for information value:
1) There are many alternatives to managing time than putting a text description into a dumb container. A meeting at 10 to 11? The Meeting Meter turns the immutable fact of an hour long meeting into something which can begin to be managed. No longer is time the controlling dimension.
2) How often is some word like quality mentioned in the company mission statement? Now how much of daily activities are about quality, and how much is about shipping product instead? How many meetings in the schedule bear the notation “Rephrase the topic in terms of quality.” And how many meetings with customers are used to find out what quality means to them? Scheduling and project management software time–style sheets could offer different types of work: oversight, independent, goal–based, prototype–driven, relationship–driven, continuous improvement, mission–aligned, knowledge, opportunity, and other styles of time management.
3) To Do lists? Perhaps, like Lockheed, a set of red flag mechanisms informing the project milestones would persuade a better alternative — a list of what not to do. Ironically, while integrated into generation after generation of cutting edge scheduling software, To Do lists are maintainers of the status quo.
Resources
- Project Managment and the Market for Disinformation “How did this happen? How did things that have no correlation to the success of a project become more attractive than things that do? ” …“In essence, project plans and reports never include the most important information about the likelihood of project success. Never.”
- Multi–Tasking: Why projects take so long and still go late “In most project environments multi–tasking is a way of life. This seemingly harmless activity, often celebrated as a desirable skill, is one of the biggest culprits in late projects, long project durations, and low project output. At the same time it is one of the least understood factors in managing projects”.
- Using inkling markets managers can accurately predict when a project will complete.
- Critical Chain Project Management “CCPM users report 95% on–time and on–budget completion when CCPM is applied correctly.” If only the developers of time and project management software could report as much.
- What’s on your not-to-do list? asks a strategic question at the crux of user objectives. The other great thing about activity based planning is that it lets you make a list of what features not to do.
- The construction of scheduling software rarely concerns itself with why schedules fail. In Eventually, our entire day will consist of interruptions you see an interaction design failure. Software can be designed to reduce interruptions and maintain the peak productivity state of flow, something business application developers are learning from computer game developers.
- PDF Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well–Being of Employees Hardly surprising, more meetings equal less well–being.
- That people don’t follow the discussion during conference calls is no surprise; technology has us so plugged into data, we have turned off.
- Cliff Atkinson suggests we move beyond Powerpoint bullets to the mechanics of how humans are persuaded. A handheld device can mean the difference between participating in a 401(k) plan or not explains how. Companies like Presentationtesting.com and certain colleges improve feedback and classroom participation using mobile phones or other feedback devices which persuade behavior.
- The Meaning of “Schedule” By Sheryl Smith is just another example of information and technology not getting together. People have different time styles for different kinds of work scheduling software is oblivious of.
- In Scheduling Ourselves to Death the task of scheduling a meeting is well implemented. The singular task is so well implemented users need to create ‘meetings’ alone with themselves to get work done. Subverting the task the software was designed for meets the larger objective users really desire.
- Goal–Directed Design by Alan Cooper explains why “Designing from tasks instead of goals is one of the main causes of frustrating and ineffective interaction. Asking, ‘What are the user’s goals?’ lets us see through the confusion and create more appropriate and satisfying design.”
- More about the Dekoven Meeting Meter. Check out an example of the Dekoven Online Meter. Another example: What Meetings Cost the Organization calculator (imagine signing out the conference room, only to have the total cost of the meeting appear with it.) Other interesting ideas for better meetings.