Multi-Tasking: Why Projects Take so Long
Posted on July 30, 2007 Comments (3)
From a new, interesting, Theory of Constraint blog by Kevin Fox – Multi-Tasking: Why projects take so long and still go late
In many companies the impact of multi-tasking is obscured by the fact that in spite of its prevalence most projects still finish on time. While this reliability is nice, it masks the even more significant opportunity to cut project durations substantially. If projects are being delivered on or close to schedule, and multi-tasking is occurring, it can only mean that the task estimates used in the plan are significantly inflated.
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But understanding is not enough. The drivers of multi-tasking are built into the processes, measurements, and systems most companies manage their projects. We strive hard to keep people busy all of the time, to maximize the output of all of our resources and be efficient. Performance measures on project managers and executives motivate them to focus on delivering individual projects, without understanding of the impact of their actions on the rest of the pipeline. Conventional scheduling and pipelining tools pay no attention to these factors and routinely overload resources making multi-tasking nearly inevitable.
…
But understanding is not enough. The drivers of multi-tasking are built into the processes, measurements, and systems most companies manage their projects. We strive hard to keep people busy all of the time, to maximize the output of all of our resources and be efficient. Performance measures on project managers and executives motivate them to focus on delivering individual projects, without understanding of the impact of their actions on the rest of the pipeline. Conventional scheduling and pipelining tools pay no attention to these factors and routinely overload resources making multi-tasking nearly inevitable.
via: Silk and Spinach. Related: articles on Theory of Constraints – Multitasking is not Part of Standard Work – Flow – Fast Cycle Change in Knowledge-Based Organizations – single piece flow
3 Responses to “Multi-Tasking: Why Projects Take so Long”
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September 5th, 2007 @ 8:04 am
“On average, workers are interrupted once every ten and a half minutes, according to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studied the cost of worker multitasking. Once interrupted, it takes a worker 23 minutes on average to get back to the task she was working on…”
May 10th, 2010 @ 6:22 pm
“In a recent study by Eric Horvitz and the University of Illinois, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages…”
August 5th, 2010 @ 2:22 pm
Jason Yip explores the value of reducing work in process and reducing context switching costs to optimize throughput. By designing processes to work on projects serially instead of in parallel we reduce context switching, and other costs, of multitasking…