
How Plans Kill Productivity - abhiraj60
http://assistwindow.com/bwm/posts/how-plans-kill-productivity/
======
scotty79
> I came across several such incidents when I saw employees gossiping about
> the changes or tweaks that could have dramatically improved productivity but
> they never conveyed them to their seniors

If I don't have "You are to save your employer and your management from
consequences of their stupidity." written in job description then I don't see
why should I provide them with my insight unasked. Especially since no good
deed goes unpunished.

For example while working at corporation I may have an idea of how to do some
things simpler but I can't take for granted that making things simpler is
beneficial to my supervisor or the team he supervises. Voicing my idea could
put my supervisor in awkward situation.

I suppose start-ups are more straightforward.

~~~
viraptor
That's a very sad view on the employer-employee relationship. I assume that's
why inteligent people are hired in general - pretty much the opposite of what
you wrote. Unless you're an assembly line worker and your position is just not
important enough to be replaced by a machine (yet), I would hope that any
improvements you can come up with are going to be respected. Not necessarily
accepted and implemented but at least considered.

I'd really hate to ever be in a position where an overall improvement is
treated as a bad thing because of politics.

~~~
knieveltech
Have you not worked in an office environment at a medium to large sized
company yet? As cynical as the original comment comes across it neatly
encapsulates the realities of working in that kind of environment.

~~~
viraptor
I do work in a (very) large company. I also managed to be fairly successful in
ignoring the politics and just doing the job, raising issues with processes
and problems in my and other teams when I saw them. If I'm ever punished for
doing that, I'll start sending out my resume to other companies most likely.

~~~
scotty79
That's perfectly possible if you have strong enough position and you are ok
with some people hating you silently.

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brazzy
Plans that people rigidly adher to even though the information they were based
on is completely outdated are pretty bad.

But know what's even worse? Having no plan at all, or just a vague mission
statement. Because then you have no way to answer the question "what do I do
next and how do I know it's finished?", and you end up yak shaving, turd
polishing, working at cross purposes and just plain killing time, often way
past the point where the project cannot achieve its goals any more and just
lacks someone with the courage to kill it.

To be useful, a plan has to be updated regularly.

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edderly
It feels easy to blame planning. If I take your interpretation, plans are
checklist tasks or milestones for management to measure developer progress. At
worst a plan can be something you create for someone else to flog you with it.
These sort of plans are also by their nature almost always inaccurate to some
degree.

To my mind a good plan is one where it can provide context for an entire team
about where and what (to some level of accuracy) needs to be done. Part of
planning is to reduce the principle-agent type problems that come with
software. Individual developers are responsible for their own plan and it
isn't too constrained so at their own liberty people can swap or modify what
they need to do without centralized agreement.

Planning isn't easy, and I agree that sometimes the best plan for some types
of work is to be very short term and iterative.

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gadders
Straw man argument.

A more accurate title would be "How Bad Project Management Kills
Productivity". It's like the author has never heard of Rolling Wave planning
[1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Wave_planning>

~~~
abhiraj60
Well, Your title suggestion inspires me to write another article around
management and productivity but I need some more research for it :)

~~~
gadders
:-)

It grinds my gears how we get articles along the lines of "I worked somewhere
with pathological project management. Therefore all project management is
stupid. YAY DEVELOPERS!!"

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Nikolas0
Great article. Funny thing that I was planning with my colleagues a project
right before I read it and we realised that planning is not going to help a
lot.

I mean it's cool to have some rough estimate but you can never be accurate,
especially when a project involves doing things for the first time (ie.
innovating)

~~~
abhiraj60
Thanks Nikolas! Glad you liked it!

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beardedinventor
As a developer recently turned project manager I've come to learn a lot about
planning and documentation. I understand the reluctance to plan, and to create
project documents at the beginning of a project.. but there are good reasons.

One of the key was to create an environment where developers are free from
distraction and able to efficiently develop is to have someone plan, and to
communicate.

Here's my (somewhat brutal) response to your article:
[http://beardedinventor.com/blog/2013/01/23/plans-dont-
kill-p...](http://beardedinventor.com/blog/2013/01/23/plans-dont-kill-
productivity/)

------
Achshar
I am having a serious deja vu reading this. I am pretty sure I have read a
post exactly like this one here on HN that suggested plans destroy developer
interest/creativity and they end up just following the plan instead of
suggesting something that they think would be better. It was long time ago.

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RTigger
I ended up blogging in response - <http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/01/23/short-
term-planning/>

TL;DR - I agree, and highlight how the short-term planning process baked into
most agile approaches addresses this problem.

~~~
abhiraj60
Cool!

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thomseddon
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://assistwindow.com/bwm/posts/how-
plans-kill-productivity/)

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pmorici
This is talking about "plans" in the sense of a grand plan not like, "I plan
to get x done today" which I find quite helpful in being productive.

~~~
gutnor
Indeed, even team planning, goal settings, ... are useful to avoid wasting
time on low value stuff, or getting stuck when others can help.

Problem of project plan generally is the divide and conquer approach. Work is
divided in various independent streams, but plan very often fail to consider
that the final product need to be whole and underestimate the merging side of
stuff.

Getting the balance right is always the problem. Applies not only to planning,
but to testing, designing, documenting, certifying, optimizing, supporting,
...

