Stop Overloading Engineers, While Increasing Project Throughput
Scenario: WebCo, a company with about 200 contributors, was having trouble keeping projects on schedule. An analysis of the root causes showed that engineers worked long days. Many of these workdays included many meetings that were not about their highest priority project. The VP of Engineering suspected that her staff were getting stretched too thin. She did some quick research, counting the number of projects each staff member was juggling day-to-day. She then did some quick math and created the table below.
The table showed that three-quarters of her staff were working on three or more projects. Fifteen percent were juggling five or six projects. Too much of valuable contributor time was occupied with meetings and communications related to too many different projects. This is non-value-added time, time spent on activities that are not in the core skill set of the engineering contributor. Something had to give.
Plotting a curve that maps value-added time over the number of parallel projects per engineer, researchers found a sweet spot. The peak occurs between projects 1 and 2. At that number of projects-per-person, 65% of an engineer’s time is spent adding value to projects. Other research shows that multi-tasking is largely mythical. There’s a costly segment of time lost when an engineer changes focus to another project. The throughput of the system is faster and more efficient when contributors work on no more than two projects at a time.
We’ve leveraged this research to create a tool called the Project Efficiency Chart that helps managers visualize project overload. It uses the curve determined Create a histogram based on a table like the one WebCo’s VP of Engineering made above, with the percentage of people who are working on between one and six projects. Then compare this histogram to the ideal curve identified 
The tables and tools we have described above provide a visual map of functions on “overload.” We find that most managers are blind to the negative program management consequences of project overload. They may continue to insist that “more is more.” But if the goal is speeding new products to market “more” is not necessarily better. Management needs to balance and normalize workloads to maximize efficiency, improve morale, and keep valuable talent around, for many successful projects to come.
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John Carter has been a widely respected adviser to technology firms over his career. John is the author of Innovate Products Faster: Graphical Tools for Accelerating Product Development. As Founder and Principal of TCGen Inc., he has advised some of the most revered technology firms in the world.