What would happen if your IT department removed the ticketing system they use to manage requests and let the individual IT employees determine their priorities? This would be based on a mix of the authority of the requestor, the stated urgency, the preference to do the task, the time it came to their attention, the persistence of the requestor, relationship of the requestor to the requestee, bribes like donuts, and probably a few other variables. Some requests would be handled fast, some would be forgotten, and it would be hard for them to effectively support all of their customers.
This is how many of us are forced to do our jobs.
I used to work at a 50-person company. 90% of the team were in the same office and we could either talk in person, via email, meetings, or via chat. I would estimate that I interacted with 5-7 people in a day amongst these different channels and this would take no more than an hour a day. I now work in a much larger company and I estimate that an average engineer in my team interacts with about 12-14 people each day.
Consider Metcalf’s Law. At the 50-person company, there were a maximum of 21 possible connections, at my current company there are a minimum of 66 possible connections.
At the 50-person company, I spent roughly half an hour to one hour each day talking to others about work and the rest of the time doing the work. At my current company engineers spend 2-4 hours a day talking about the work.
When increasing the number of people on a team the stress is higher, back-and-forth communication increases, more time is spent monitoring conversations (checking email), switching tasks in the middle of what you are working on increases, meetings increase, and errors increase.
When everybody is trying to find time to do the critical work the quality of conversation decreases making this all worse. Instead of waiting to find time to meet someone in their cubical, we fire a short email off which forces even more time back and forth to make up for the low-fidelity communication.
In other words, with more people to interact with the more administrative overhead required to manage the work and less time for actual work.
Many managers don’t realize the problem. When they were individual contributors the problem was not as significant, the teams were smaller and they came up at a time when email was not as important so they currently have a different skill set to handle it. They are also insulated as managers from connecting with as many people as their team members.
There is a social dynamic at play here too. Requestors will take advantage of individuals who will handle any request without question, overburdening the requestee. There is also a tendency to make everything seem more urgent than it really is (“the plant is going to shut down if this is not done”) or by artificially squeezing need dates for requests. This leads to a culture in which everybody feels everything is urgent and everyone is constantly hurried.
We (I’m talking to you managers) need to acknowledge that we are not 5 person teams, we are stressing our team members, and we are hindering the amount of work we can get done. We need to put in systems to manage the communication and workload. There are many repeated tasks we do with no defined standard process. I have found it hard to identify all of these processes (hidden factories). To help resolve this for my team, I am implementing a ticketing system to capture requests to my team which will replace most emails. This does several things. It removes the social dynamics, helps me see where the workload is unbalanced, identifies where we need to define/improve processes for repeated tasks, and holds all related conversations and information on a topic in one place.
If you are a manager (or team member) see if you can implement a ticketing system to reduce communication overhead in your teams. This can be a piece of software or it can be done with a simple spreadsheet. Please reach out in the comments if you would like to talk about this for your team.
This is another method I am using to lower my team members’ stress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiMcewLra2g