Comments on Bruce's Brain: Multi-Tasking is Killing Your Business

Excellent illustration of this phenomenon. I notic...

2009-02-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

Excellent illustration of this phenomenon. I noticed on the LiquidPlanner forum, that people are asking for the ability to better represent multitasking in LP "because we have to multitask". Huh?! Sigh... Please God Make Them Read This Post.

I'm getting some of this at my company right now, and I need to go beat people over the head with a copy of "The Goal" or "Critical Chain".

Regards,
Rick Cogley
Tokyo

I have experienced on some multi-tasking software ...

2008-08-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have experienced on some multi-tasking software projects too. In facts, it not only killing my business. It kills me and my men. We found ourselves frustated, overwhelmed, and got a job burnout.

I totally agree with Bruce on his thought Multi-Ta...

2008-02-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

I totally agree with Bruce on his thought Multi-Tasking is Killing Your Business. I have experienced on some multi-tasking projects, especially software projects, and it sucks. Yes, it killing my business.

Why Multi-Tasking Sucks

Oh how I wish I could retract the many times I've ...

2007-10-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

Oh how I wish I could retract the many times I've written or stated that I was a "multi-tasker!" I now know that translated to "I don't ever really devote as much time/effort as I should to any single task."

If you haven't checked out the book about Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, you might consider doing so.

I appreciate that you included examples in this post...thanks for letting me comment!

~Marisa

That would be in the ideal world. Unfortunately we...

2007-09-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

That would be in the ideal world. Unfortunately we don't live on one. While I agree multitasking is not good at all, I'm definitely not religious about the subject. Context switching can't be avoided, especially when emergency situations happen (and they happen all the time).

Discussion about multitasking and context switching is as old as development, but I choose the realists side, not the idealists one.

awsome post Bruce.Ciprian(http://www.linkedin.com/...

2007-09-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

awsome post Bruce.
Ciprian
(http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=5213932)

@Steve - Thanks for the comment!It is supposed to ...

2007-09-08T01:11:00.000-07:00

@Steve - Thanks for the comment!

It is supposed to be a simple model to demonstrate to a business owner why randomizing the hell out of developers actually hurts their business. This was never meant to be a perfect model of everything (like seasonality or SEC imposed deadlines) that a business might encounter. The beauty of simple models is that they are easy to understand and clearly demonstrate a principle (like don't randomize your workers). Simple models are unfortunately very easy to throw rocks at.

I don't think that you're suggesting that a company like Expedia would have only one developer working on a project like adding cruises to the site, right? There would be a whole team with each of them working on their part of the project. But you would not want the same team to be simultaneously working on 10 other major projects. Instead you'd want the project team to focus on the one project, get it shipped (or at least ready to ship), then move on to the next project.

You're right about business value not (always) being linear over time. But if I felt time variable value would make the explanation even more confusing. Do you have a simple way to improve the model? I'd really like to find one because it would make the case much stronger.

Hey Bruce,You're ignoring the fact that a typical ...

2007-09-06T23:01:00.000-07:00

Hey Bruce,

You're ignoring the fact that a typical organization has more than one person. While trying to do two different things at once may be hard for a single person, two people working on the same thing at once causes problems, too. "Nine women can't make a baby in one month..."

Also, by focusing more people onto the same problem, you most often just make it worse - Brook's Law

Also, business value vs. delivery time isn't linear. Having a Fall promotion ready in April doesn't add 4 months of value, if you're two weeks late on that Christmas product, you could miss all of the value, etc.

Hey Bruce, I totally agree!This is an excellent a...

2007-09-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Hey Bruce, I totally agree!

This is an excellent argument for managing a project in a SCRUM as well. if you break this model down further and take a given project and break it into the tasks to complete the project...

for example, lets say you are building a simple web application that has 4 main modules:
1. Login
2. Account management
3. Feature A
4. Feature B

And has need for SQL and Web work for each of these

If you did this in a typical waterfall approach and you estimate the time to do all of these features is say... 2 weeks each (just so we have a nice round number). If you work a little bit on all of them each week then at the end of 8 weeks you might have something you can show as a working build.

however if you worked single threaded on the highest priority thing (Say Login is first) then even if you don't have all of the rest done you can at least show the db structure and the working prototype of Login done at the end of 2 weeks.

again the average time to see working features of a project also goes down... and the most important ones are ready first.

Good stuff.

Thanks,
Ken Mizell
Director QA/Testing - Mantis
Ken.Mizell@mantis-tgi.com
c. 206.852.0249
w. 425.250.0421
f. 425-250-0401
"Whether you think you can or you think you cannot, you are right!" - Henry Ford