Archive for April, 2010

A Shorter Working Day – The Power Of Balance

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

A lot people seem to think that the longer the hours you work the more important you are. I whole-hearted disagree with this. It is very easy to waste 12 hours inventing tasks, browsing the web, playing games or chatting online.

If you are super efficient and productive, if you do not get distracted and if you put all your effort into the work you do, an 8 hour day is more than enough time. As I have written about before most people will fill their day regardless of whether they work 2 hours or 15 hours.

If you are in a job where you need to:

  • Be creative
  • Make tough decisions
  • Manage a team of people
  • Evangelise
  • Develop strategy
  • Think deeply
  • Communicate

Chances are that you will be a lot more effective if you are well rested and have real work life balance. But is this the case in reality?

The shorting working day experiment

Historically I was a real workaholic, I often would work 14 hour days and because I love what I do I could tell myself that these kind of hours were ok. Now I have a family my time seems a lot more important and I wanted to address this issue without impacting my business profitability.

So over the last month I decided to see how much effect it would have on my productivity if I experimented with a shorter working day. Here were my rules:

  • Arrive at the office no later than 8am
  • Leave no later than 5pm
  • No personal browsing or personal tasks during the day e.g. editing photos, Facebook etc
  • No working in the evening
  • Keep distractions to a minimum
  • Focus on what is important not what is urgent
  • Remove non-essential tasks

The results

What I actually have found is that instead of my productivity going down, in fact because I am well rested (assuming my son does not wake up at 5am like he has a habit of doing!) I am actually getting more done in less time.

There are other massive benefits as well:

  • More time (and more importantly more attention) with my family
  • Huge increase in enthusiasm during the working day
  • Time for personal hacking and coding projects which allow you to improve your skills
  • Better well-being
  • Reduced stress
  • Better decision making
  • Better communication and patience

Some very well publicised case studies including 37Signals and Carsonified have actually moved to a 4-day working week and they have not seen any loss in productivity or profits.

I would urge you to try it for yourself, keep a record of how much you get done in a normal working week, then have a look to see how many of those tasks actually needed to be done. Then try a few weeks working a shorter working day with increased focus and efficiency. I would be interested to see how you get on with your own experiments!

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Fixed Price vs Daily Rate – Lessons Learned From Agile Scrum

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

If you are involved in quoting for software projects you have to make sure that you estimate each job correctly or you could find that a job quickly becomes unprofitable. In reality it is very hard to estimate as you rarely have a defined technical spec and requirements are constantly changing.

Often the scope creep, changes and alterations can account for 20-30% of a project, could there be a better way?

I am not sure that the fixed price model is so valid any more, the scope is rarely fixed so why should the budget be fixed? I am going to experiment with a new model that take some ideas from agile development method scrum.

Instead of a scope of work have a backlog

This is a high level document for the whole project. It contains broad descriptions of all of the features, wish list items and nice to have items. The most important part is that it is then prioritised by business need with rough estimates for business value and development effort. This document should be owned by the project manager and the client.

Fast iterations, the sprint backlog

This document shows all the features that are going to be developed in the upcoming sprint (typically 1-2 weeks). The highest priority features from the backlog are developed first. The features are broken down into tasks (which should be no more than 2-12 hours work). Anyone on the development team can then work on a task they are not assigned. A task sheet is often used so you can keep track of the progress of the tasks.

Burndown

The burndown chart is something that is visible to the whole team and the client and shows the remaining work for the current sprint. It should always be up-to-date and used as a reference for when the sprint will be complete.

How can this help us with pricing?

The great thing about this method is that it prioritises the most valuable features for the business. It also means that if the client wants to add new features they must take out other features or it is very obvious that the scope has increased and that will incur an extra fee.

So your fixed price means a fixed amount of effort which is then allocated against tasks. Once the allocated time runs out and the agreed features are delivered, your client can then buy more effort or sign off the project as complete. I am not sure how this will work in practice but there has to be a better way to estimate and cost projects.

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Share Your Ideas – But Only To The Right People

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

I have been reading a few articles recently that are advising people not be so secretive with their business ideas. They advise sharing ideas with as many people as you can to get feedback, advice and to give you the chance to hone your elevator pitch. I think that this has merit BUT it also has the ability to cause confusion and procrastination.

If you have an idea that you really believe in, then the hardest part of making your idea a reality is the execution. If you ask too many people for feedback, you will get too many opinions and you may get overwhelmed or dismayed. For example take a look at the following:

  • A site to broadcast updates only up to 140 characters (Twitter)
  • A website where anyone can update the definitions of anything (Wikipedia)
  • A place to upload your videos of anything (YouTube)

None of those propositions sounded compelling to me when I first heard about them, but the results speak for themselves.

I do think that it is a good idea to talk about your idea, but start with close friends and family until you have perfected your pitch. Then move onto sharing your idea with the actual customers you are targeting, it is their opinion that counts the most.

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