My team is very productive. Really !!!

In today’s competitive world, majority of the organizations (IT service Industry in particular) are facing a challenge to sustain good gross margins. There are many proven as well as new and innovative ways that have been devised by these organizations, that will help them improve on gross margins. Top most of these being improving the productivity of the existing team.

I am going to talk about only one way which has been implemented in our company and holds the potential to improve productivity.

Typically there are 2 types of people in the project (Makers and Managers). Makers are primarily developers and testers whose main focus is on designing, coding, testing, development, creative work etc. and Managers are (as name suggests) whose main work is planning, preparing for meetings, doing meetings etc.

Makers are the people who need Sustained Attention (i.e. manage high attention spans as they need to be focused for longer duration in order to write good code, do good testing etc.), while Managers need Alternating Attention (as they need to focus on multiple tasks and activities and need to switch between then quite often).

In today’s digital world lot of information is available but at times this can distract people.  Similarly as part of Agile best practices, where a lot of open conversation is encouraged for good reasons can cause and break sustained attention spans of people who want to focus long hours on writing their core logic. Both of the above can have a negative impact on the sustained attention span period of teams, makers in particular.

As per Harvard Business Review report, there are 22 interrupts that we get from others per day and as a manager this number is a daunting 50-60 interrupts per day, which means 1 interrupt per 8 minutes. And it takes us 23 minutes to get back to our 100% concentration.

So in order to improve team's productivity, one of the very essential and key aspects is to minimize interruptions. In order to do this we implemented something called FOCUS HOUR. Here are the guidelines of focus hour:

Focus hour was a time period in which team members were supposed to focus on their core activity of the day without getting distracted and without distracting others. We implemented this 2 times a day (1.5 hours each). Teams members were supposed to equipped themselves from all information before this period starts. They shall seek all guidance, help etc. before this hour. Other key guidelines for the Focus hours were:

1. Switch off email notifications
2. No Phone calls
3. Avoid breaks
4. No outsider to be allowed to come in the working areas
5. No conversations

We received a positive feedback about Focus Hours from all the teams though it is yet to be seen how exactly we can measure productivity improvement post this strategy has been implemented.

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