Since August 2007, employees of LogicaCMG India have been maintaining hourly logs of their activities at work. This includes the nature of work, the status of the work, tasks completed, meetings attended; indeed, just about everything, including the time spent at the cafeteria.
It then shows how many hours were spent on each production activity including support , testing, development, project management, review and rework ; on preventive activities like process improvements and self-development ; on organization support activities like interviews , training, meetings and customer visits; and finally on idle time like waiting-for-work or personal time.
The report adds up all that to give the productive hours utilized. It then subtracts that from the previously calculated "available hours", and Verma gets the unutilized time. In the one instance we were shown, the unutilized time stood at 1.5 hours out of a total of 656 available staff hours, or 0.23%.
"I can check such things project-wise, location-wise , competency-wise . I can check the changes over time. I can exactly identify who was responsible for a delay in a project. In fact, we have broken things down in a way that everything can be quantified," says Verma.
Verma of LogicaCMG admits there was resistance when employees were asked to log in hourly details: "There were questions like: I'm doing intellectual work, why should I do such things." But over time, everybody appears to have got into the groove.
To me this resembles Taylorism and Scientific Management . I thought they went out of fashion in the 1950s.
Instead, a focus on Lean Operations might be called for -
The Principles of Lean
Improve Continuously - Get your employees to suggest ways to improve and implement the good ideas on a continuous basis.
Involve Everyone - Software programmers dont like to enter detailed logs of how they spent every minute. Especially if that data is being used to find out "who delayed the project".
Eliminate Waste -
There are 7 types of waste ("S W I M T O O") which can be recognised in most organisations:
- Scrap (or Defects) - Do you detect defects early? Do you practice prototyping? Can your employees "stop the production line" if they see problems?
- Waiting - Is your staff kept waiting for signoffs, approvals etc.?
- (Excess) Inventory - Are you understaffed/overstaffed in a particular area - E.g., is your Business Analyst swamped with volumes of paperwork awaiting processing? Are your servers underutilized?
- Motion - Do you have unnecessary movement and travelling?
- Transportation - Are your teams flat enough? Does information make unnecessary hops? Does your staff have to keep switching between unrelated projects?
- Overproduction - What steps in your process don't add real value?
- Overprocessing - Do you require six sign-offs when three will do?
