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*Put down the Blackberry. Step away from the Blackberry please.”

When I read this article about Obama’s Blackberry use, I rolled my eyes at some of the intellectual stretches it was taking. While I agree with the premise and I do certainly understand the Blackberry-jones (nervous separation anxiety and the compulsion to thumb it when the little red light blinks) premise, I was far more interested in the work that Gloria Mark was engaged in.

“When Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, shadowed employees at two high-tech firms, she found that the average worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and asked to do something else. IT workers have it worse, switching attention every three minutes, on average.”  - Newsweek Magazine, 2/16/09

Over the last ten years, Gene Kim and I have been inside of and benchmarked hundreds of IT organizations, conducted numerous research studies and written a LOT about this very topic of unplanned work. We have come to believe that, largely, IT management as a whole has not built an effective system for “Doing IT.”  This study from the University of California dovetails with some of our findings from benchmarking nearly 1000 IT organizations.

Namely, the first finding that Unplanned Work, which by definition is the IT equivalent of task assignment by drive-by-shooting (fire-fighting outages, urgent security patching or compliance related work, essentially anything that takes a worker off of the planned task list of things that are important) is virtually non-existent in high performing shops compared to everyone else.  This is evident both by the low amount of it (expressed as a percentage of labor opex often as low as five to ten percent, compared to the rest at twenty to fifty percent of labor opex lost to heat) and by the advantage high performers have over everyone else in project execution. High performers get up to 8X the projects done, 14-16x times the infrastructure changes with one-half the change failure rate.  Also, their mean time to repair an outage is as low as 1/10 the time of low performers!  All of this creates higher availability and the ability to execute more projects in a more controlled manor with less negative business impact.

Oh yeah, did I mention that they do this with as little as 1/4 of the system administrator staff when compared to low performers?

By building an effective execution flow system it is not only possible, it is probable that you will outperform your competitors and actually help your company meet its goals.

Over the last ten years Gene and I have learned:

1.       Constant fire-fighting  and uncontrolled change weakens infrastructure and creates security problems,

2.       The hero culture that ensues accelerates the rate of outage entropy because little information and visibility in to the known good state exists for others to draw on,

3.       Your best and most talented people are stuck on the fire-fighting line instead of solving business problems,

4.       Your ability to demonstrate proof of compliance diminishes with the more outages you have,

5.       More fire-fighting = less project and planned work = less credibility with business peers = shadow IT = failure,

6.       This can all be fixed by building a system based on Flow and controls.  No, I am not speaking of a never-ending-death-march of process analysts and skies darkened by consultants. I am talking about building a deliberate discovery based system that illuminates what is actually happening versus obscuring it. This type of system learns from every mistake and seldom repeats the mistakes made in the past.

Sound interesting?  If this is the direction your organization wants to move - Dramatically Lower Cost structures, Drastically Increased Project Delivery capability, and Rock Solid Reliability, then contact me here and let’s talk about how we can help!

We are currently doing just this for some of the most advanced and largest IT operations in existence today.