Which way do you approach your projects?

Book collection
Originally uploaded by Ian Wilson.

John Maeda posted some thoughts on Multitasking that opened up a stream of thought that I've decided to blog about it!

I sent a graph (below) to John Maeda that showed why doing more usually means achieving less. the original graph comes from pg. 91 of Wheelwright and Clarke's book "Revolutionising Product Development" and I believe the information that it is based on is in the paper:

Jeffrey K. Liker and Walton M. Hancock. "Organizational Systems Barriers to Engineering Effectiveness". IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 33(2):82-91, May 1986. At this time, I was working for the Harris Corporation on CAD related issues; most of the senior management were ex-IBM and I was given a hard-bound copy of the research done into engineers and the way they spent their time. As I was supporting the bid to increase the market share of the HarrisCAD system in European engineering enterprises I used the report as the basis of a V-Calc (VisiCalc that ran on a Harris Mini-computer) spreadsheet. This enabled me to dial in the prospect's design office statistics number of designers they employed, number of contract designers, output of Design Schemes, ... the number of CADstations they were proposing to buy, etc. Bearing in mind the Chief Designer had probably never asked for more than the money for a drawing board (upto £2,000 for a really good one) and CADStaions were around £250,000 for the first two seats and £75,000 for the next few! it is not surprising that cost drove the proposed purchase. Putting in the relevant  data and then playing what-ifs on the numbers to see the optimum CAD investment to meet their strategy, revealed that the Chief Designer was setting himself up for some serious future budgetary issues. We used to get the commercial director to drift away from the technical CAD demo to play with the spreadsheet (most had only heard about spreadsheets as PC's were not yet ubiquitous). Most commercial directors then asked the chief designer why they were not asking for more CAD seats as 1 or 2 usually put costs up but the productivity was not sufficient to offset the cost of running the whole office plus the CAD system... more seats usually meant that office productivity rather than individual CAD User's productivity went up dramatically!

So that's the story behind that graph!...  I used it to justify each project to be done more effectively so Design office throughput per year could increase without giving more projects to each person. I still have the hardcopy but its in the archive..

I'll dig it out and.....

Why the title picture .. well it is better to queue projects so we can get to one or two at a time but we know that there is more to come (especially if we have to cancel a project.. we can see there are more to take its place). Piling our projects horizontally so we can do several at the same time means we spend time lifting up and pulling out the relevant "volume" and probably drop one or two, lose the page and get really upset so we don't do much work on any of them... sound familiar?

John has done a second post here too.

Why do I think this is so important?

I think the same cognitive processes are going on as are highlighted by Bill Buxton in his paper "Less is More (More or Less)" (see page 9). Also highlighted by Cliff Atkinson is our inability to handle a large number of chunks of information at a time... the restriction is what he calls "The eye of the Needle".

It used to be the rule that we could handle 7 plus or minus 2 topics at a time... It turns out that the maximum seems to be three... which ties up with the diagram that John Maeda reminded me of!!!!

 

Comments

[Sebastiao Barata]

The link for "the eye of the needle" is broken (you forget the http:// so you get a "no page found" error because it is trying to find it on your blog.

[Jim]

Fixed...thanks