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One of the hardest things I face as a developer is to get the number of billable hours right in the timesheet. Traditional office work always meant to be hours present in the office to be equivalent to the number of hours worked as there was a structure and flow to the work. It is unfortunate that the knowledge workers fall into the bucket of hours of work at the workplace as a measure of billable work.

Knowledge workers have to do a good deal of home work to stay up to date. Any task at hand they pick, will involve some amount of deep thinking and application of knowledge. Thinking can happen anytime and not necessarily at workplace. Hypnagogia has provided me some solutions for some pressing problem, it is also famous for discovering Benzene ring structure. If a scientist can benefit (eventually monetary) from that kind of discovery, then why not we bill the time we spend in thinking about the problem in hand while waiting at the traffic signal lights or having a shower.

In the book Pragmatic thinking and learning, the author mentions about L-mode and R-mode of the brain; there is an example of that here. What we usually end up billing as a knowledge worker is what is done by L-mode, but the many of the inputs comes from the R-mode of the brain. The bias of billing for the L-mode makes people spend a good deal of time with tools rather than thinking about the solution and constantly striving to update themselves. It leads into a vicious cycle of working too long without success if the task at hand requires deep knowledge and application, which leads to more hours billed without any work done.

We should look at work as a whole outcome than measuring it in terms of man hours or lines of code. In that way it provides the individuals the freedom to plan their day and deliver effectively at their job.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Almost every office room meeting place has a table. Rooms of different sizes gets filled up with tables of comparable sizes barely leaving enough space for the chairs and some people to move around. Using the right tools for the right job is necessary, the same way the right meeting room setup is necessary for different types of meetings. A typical conference table usually creates a perception in the attendees that either there is a head of the table or sub consciously it is a Us vs Them debate. If a lot of collaboration is required in the gathering then the table in between the people does not help.

Anything in between people is a barrier, unless people are trained to overcome that. Tables are usually designed to fit the room such that the periphery is a usable space. A typical conference is room is bigger length wise, trying to focus on one side of the room where the presenter or the head of the table is. I have observed in many of the meetings when we need to have a huddle or a focussed discussion then most of the people leave their seats and crowd around a corner to put their ideas together and come with a common picture. Every person in the room has to shift to some other side leaving the comfort of their seats to get something done.

Increasingly we use workshop/brainstorm style meetings which requires frequent huddles and group interactions. By having a large almost square shaped room without tables to occupy the free space, we will be able to promote free movement of people. Also the square shape will not plant a thought in people’s mind that the conversation is unidirectional. The times I have tried this approach of having sessions in large rooms and easy to move furniture, I found good level of participation from everyone.

Table is definitely an important furniture but filling rooms entirely with a table for convenience will make people just too comfortable in their zones.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Malcolm Gladwell mentions an example in his book “The Tipping Point” that when the number of people who can act in the scene increases then the number of people who will act will decrease considerably. My observation on this has been very similar when working with project teams, I guess that is almost everyone’s observation as the big ball of mud is often noted in the codebase of large teams. Gladwell says that people are lot more sensitive to their environment than they seem. It is no surprise that the retrospective prime directive says

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand

It is so surprising that how an individual would never do something alone will do that when doing it as a group or vice versa. Brain (mind) also keeps growing beyond the physical growth and can reach very high levels of maturity over the course of years. An writeup on Constructive developmental theory by Peter Pruyn predicts that around 58% of the population is stuck at the maturity level “Socialized mind”. At this level of maturity an individual’s alignment would be to conform to the local group leading to the perception of belonging to a clan. The fear of exclusion will drive most of the individual’s action. It is sort of a phobia which will prevent people from moving to higher levels of maturity as mentioned in Constructive developmental theory.

What can we do to remove this fear?

One inspiration I drew was from this ted talk. In this talk, David Kelley mentions about Guided Mastery, a technique derived from the works of Albert Bandura. Using this technique people with a specific fear get away from that fear by slowly building up the confidence; stepping up the challenge in small increments where people get used to the fearful activity but not at the level which is overwhelming. Some more info about that technique is here. In a team setup mostly people find it hard to take up a task of fixing something or letting their peers know that something is wrong and we need to correct. The reason people find it hard is because of the fear of being wrong and getting rejected. By making sure and enforcing the fact in the team that no one will be penalized just because s/he was wrong or blew a whistle; also getting the new comers feel very comfortable with this style of communication in a phased manner.

I enjoyed the transformation I went through as a team member in such a team, it definitely turned out to be a high performing team.