Redundant effort

Part of the skills of good management is to look for when the same work is being performed again and again by multiple people in the same organization.

The thought process is analogous to how a skilled software engineer goes about optimizing and streaming lining a piece software to make sure that the same logic isn’t performed in multiple places.

Why does this matter? Why does it make sense?

Think of it in terms of:

• Budget - paying multiple times for the same work isn’t good for the budget.

• Repeatable business processes - if the same work is done by multiple people on an adhoc basis it’s harder to generate a universal quality experience

Types of tools to apply to look at solving these type of issues are looking at:

• How the organization is structured?

• What is the cadence that exists?

• Is there clarity and consistency of goals?

To give case study from our own organization I observe there is a lot of redundancy in terms of how documentation and presentation resources are done. There is a lot of frustration from individual team members that they have to improvise and create their own materials. A lot of material gets shared through informal channels via personal relationships rather than being provided for by the company formal structures.

It’s definitely not due to lack of effort or desire to do the right thing.

What are tools to fix this? Tools that would jump to mind from my perspective are:

• More clarity in overall direction - I thinking education around core concepts about where we offer value and areas that we cannot realistically offer value at present.

• Helping people to communicate better in general (i.e. clarification, finding larger frames)

• Rethinking team structures - i.e. a model which works well to align a documentation specialist is what we do with the product designer being embedded into a team of solution architects for instance.