The Work Life Firewall

... as employers require individuals to check digital devices and respond 24/7, there's no clear separation between home and work. Samuel Greengard ¹

One of the key revolutions in medieval Europe was the idea of the ownership of time. It allowed Europe to create new institutions and was for good or ill one of the underlying cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution. It created the framework for the modern corporation. It also create the framework for social revolutions in slavery, child labor, and education. It is one of the things that makes being a "wage slave" satisfactory. It condenses time into money and allows us to trade money for time.

Electronic devices may inadvertently be reversing this. We may be heading back toward a world of serfs with little to no choice. With all the talk of "work life integration", some people may be losing the ability to manage time and are letting tasks manage them. There's the risk of tasks that garner our attention or that appear urgent push out the things that are truly important. With the frenetic pace many people have created for themselves and their overbooked lives, most lose the ability to take time to reflect and actively choose what is important.

Electronic toys - like the one I am typing on, have the ability to take over our lives. One of my former managers had the habit of working at odd hours to ensure he had a "work life balance". It was not unusual to receive emails composed and sent at 2:00 am, when the man was on vacation. I still entertain the fantasy of being his boss and putting his cell phone and lap top under lock and key when he leaves on vacation. I see many people trading freedom for a higher status, larger paychecks, more company owned devices with the expectation they will take the lap top - cell phone - tablet home and be available. It appears they believe that being busy is the same as being important - that the volume of work that they cram into their lives equates to having a life in balance because they can attend family activities.

I view cell phones as electronic leashes. If you give me a cell phone, I expect you will call with an expectation I will respond. I don't want to be so important I need to be available at anyone's beck and call except my children. And then only until they are self sufficient. I've built firewalls into my life - as was so succinctly put on my last review: does his work and goes home. And the projects are on time, and the fire drills are ignored. The non work troubles stay out of work. Work troubles don't go home. The work lap top stays off, except for the occasional important late meeting. The occasions are rare.

There is a movement called the Sabbath Manifesto. They're recommending we disconnect periodically for time to reflect. It sounds like a great idea to me. It's another firewall to keep life and work separated.

Sources:
¹ Samuel Greengard,  Communications of the ACM, 10/2011 Vol. 54 No. 10, Living in a Digital World, pp. 17-19

Capacity or Efficiency

Jim Highsmith wrote an interesting blog ¹ on the impact of the velocity measurement on Agile programming methods. Velocity is a measurement for how fast a group of programmers complete tasks. I've seen velocity graphs at team Scrum meetings. Usually, the velocity isn't fast enough to complete all the team hoped. For most of my team it means we were too ambitious and underestimated the effort needed. This isn't a bad thing when you acknowledge we use Scrum methods because we've never done these things before. If we had done them before we could use Project Management methods. I believe Jim's concern is managers use velocity as a measurement of efficiency rather than a measurement of capacity.

If velocity is a measurement of efficiency, individuals are accountable - they aren't working smart enough. If velocity is a measurement of capacity, managers are accountable - they aren't setting priorities, hiring enough workers, or assigning work to the right individuals. I believe velocity is a measurement of capacity - we've never done a project like this before. The process is cut the project into small pieces, you concentrate on those pieces and if you're too ambitious, you push the excess on to the next round. So you keep moving toward a goal. There is no way to be efficient - we're stepping into the unknown and probably the unknowable.

In call centers we have a similar measurement - it's called average handle time or AHT. Accountants like AHT, it gives them a way to measure the cost of a call center, but is it a measurement of efficiency or capacity. For one thing, there is an uncontrollable variable - the skill and knowledge of the person on the other side. If the calls are transactional, the impact of the other persons skill can be minimized. AHT might be used as a measurement of efficiency. If the calls are technical, the impact can go way up - unless you have a very select group of  customers with a set minimum skill level, a manager should treat AHT as a measurement of capacity and hire accordingly.

1. Velocity is Killing Agility, Jim Highsmith, retrieved 8 November 2011

Coreolis Effect

Two of my children like to run in clockwise circles.
Do you think if I took them south of the equator, they would run counter-clockwise?
If I took them to the equator, would they stop?