A bit of wishful thinking - here is what I want to have in the BCG consulting findings: 1) Professional engineers don't need two bosses. This could save significant money by eliminating redundancy. 2) Engineers waste far too much time in meetings. This should be limited to no more than 3 hours per week. If the redundant layer of useless management is removed, this is achievable. 3) CC lists on email need to be limited. Quit wasting engineers' time on weeding through useless shit. Any other findings you'd like to see?
4 replies (most recent on top)
According to the Agile management principles, the team lead shall have a 1/2 an hour face to face standing meeting with the team members, first thing every morning, so that the team can reach it's peak productivity. Currently being implemented in select teams to validate the claims of this theory. Of course the team leads who choose to participate in this experiment, will have no accountability of success or lack thereof. This is just a test, right?
Meetings are productivity killers at the engineer level. Most of this stuff can be handled by email. What would be more productive would be if the directors, project leads and so on from various depts. had planning sessions at the beginning of a project and decided on what the hell the project(s) would be, who would be in charge of what, how it would be approached, and a REASONABLE schedule for accomplishing all of this--so engineers wouldn't wind up working 80 hours per week because they were too busy having all-hands meeting where they passed out effing cupcakes or donuts.
BCG just reviewed the org chart, head counts and profit & loss per group and made their decisions. No need to talk to an engineer about which bit you've been flipping for the past 10 years.
For items #2 and #3, I've wondered about this for the longest time when I worked there (luckily, decided to move on a while ago). IMHO, most of the senior management (Sr Director and above) are sincere and smart people, but why they can't identify this stuff themselves and address it is just a total travesty of their management responsibilities. Why it takes some outside consulting group like I've heard to maybe come in and look at this and report the obvious is just brain boggling. They could institute rules such as no meeting Weds or meetings only in the afternoons and so you get an uninterrupted morning to do your work, but meetings are just productivity killers. More enlightened companies already know this and take steps to reduce this kind of BS.