| At a glance It can be myopic to focus only on the productivity of coders and developers. Don’t live with the critical systemic productivity problem, explained in this article, that is slowing everything down. Get top PSA software to solve it. |
What is your experience when you try to meet your colleague or a friend who is a senior manager in the corporate sector, particularly in an IT services firm? Do you have an uninterrupted conversation? Can you have a quality discussion?
Anecdotal experiences tell us that most such meetings get interrupted by calls or texts. Many meetings end with “can we meet later when I get more information?”
A project manager is trying to find a resource
Let’s consider a typical situation. A project manager needs to allocate resources for her project. She might start with her project task list and decide on skill sets and hours needed.
She accesses the HRMS system or a spreadsheet containing names of employees and their skill sets and narrows it down to a few employees.
She then takes a look at the resource loading chart to find out if the employees she needs are available. If she doesn’t have direct access to any of these she will have to send an email and obtain the information.
If she finds that the employees she needs are available, well and good. But wait, by the time she sends the request, that employee has been booked in some other project and the status is not updated yet.
She now has to start all over again or “ talk “ to a few project managers or the delivery head or the resource management group to find alternatives. If multiple project managers try to do this, a meeting is called. You can imagine what happens in such a meeting.
The project manager is also responsible for delivering projects within the budget, therefore she will have to calculate costs incurred on the project and estimate the expected costs and her resource allocation affect them.
Her workflows get more complex because more departments are involved in costing and budgets. Probably she will never find enough time to calculate cumulative project costs and projected costs whenever she needs to make resource-related decisions.
Studies on knowledge workers
Study after study shows that knowledge workers spend too much time gathering information scattered across the organization before they can do their actual work.
To quote from a report
“a 2018 IDC study found that “data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week” — 30% searching for, governing and preparing data plus 20% duplicating work.”
Does “ searching, preparing data, and duplicating work” ring a bell?
The critical systemic problem
Managers’ chief responsibilities are: making decisions, implementing them, and supporting and mentoring their team members. If they spend too much time gathering information their managerial contribution goes down and they become the bottlenecks.
If your organization is slow to respond to the demands of the market place, you know the reason now.
Looking to improve the productivity of coders and developers while ignoring managerial productivity can be myopic. If a specific resource to perform a specific task in a project is overbooked, it sure is a problem but its impact is confined. But if your managers are the ‘bottlenecks’, you have a big systemic problem.
What then is the way out?
Your managers spend too much time gathering and validating data due to data fragmentation in departmental silos. The genesis of data fragmentation and data duplication is in the islands of automation.
Your departments are those islands. The data silos are the legacy of automation done by various departments e.g. CRM, Project Management, HRMS, ERP, etc. Each of them serves a purpose but whenever there is a need to combine data, like in the above workflows, they all fall short.
ProductDossier PSA, a top PSA software solves this problem. The PSA integrates all your legacy packages and presents data needed in various managerial workflows like building project proposals, developing work breakdown structures, task lists, and timelines, allocating and re-allocating resources, tracking project execution, estimating current and projected project-wise costs, making and executing billing schedules, and many more.
The ProductDossier PSA presents all information in real-time and in actionable form. It eliminates the drudgery of data collection and reconciliation.
The PSA software frees managers to do justice to their core responsibilities. The software is modular and highly configurable. ProductDossier PSA can be implemented module-by-module. Each module’s implementation results in tangible gains.
Get in touch with us at sales@productdossier.com to find out how to improve your managerial productivity.
More on the subject
Let’s make a wishlist for the best PSA software
8 Reasons why organizations shouldn’t use Excel for resource planning
Listen to the Episode 4 of the ProductDossier Podcast
The missing piece in the enterprise software landscape for IT services companies
