Improve productivity in your IT Organisation
In IT world, time is money. All resources are billed on hourly or daily basis and time not utilized is as good as money wasted. There might have been several surveys around this issue but one thing is sure that focus on improving the productivity of resources has been ignored since long. Outsource vendor working on hourly basis would be more interested in expanding the work to get more billing. On the other hand a fixed cost project would see a huge shift in the approach of work again because money has to be made by saving the time. There are however no fixed method to understand how the productivity can be increased. In most of the long term projects, the teams tend to become less productive unless there is a strong and focused leadership. For short term projects, normally the productivity is higher but there is no guarantee that the cost of the project is the right one. For ensuring that any IT project or organization is adequately productive, the teams should be audited for their work and work content on regular intervals. In many cases it is seen that the jobs which appeared complex initially became routine and easy eventually taking away the need to deploy more and skilled people. Such audit helps in unraveling hidden pockets of unproductive activities which can be eliminated to keep the organization healthy and sustainable. In another method of improving productivity, it is important for adopting automation to manual work as automating processes help reduce time and quality issues. Use of special purpose tools like Clear Case do keep the cost of development lower. Reusing components and libraries are again excellent methods to keep productivity higher. The most important part of keeping productivity higher is ensuring that the requirements of development or support are made very clear and documented. In my experience, more than fifty percent time is wasted in reworks and discussions just because the user requirements and expectations were not clear.
productivity can also take factors like the value versus the efforts spend…
productivity shud also be inclusive of creativity…and when productivity is measured by mere time..it will alienate creativity as well the quality..
Alok, I am reading and commenting on this post a bit late, but the problem statment is very nicely put up here. It has become very vital to manage resources efficiently to bring and increase the productivity in IT organization. I must say it holds true to all organizations. For every organization productivity will only mean making money out of the time invested by their resources and it becomes crutial to know where one is losing time = money. And AUTOMATION is the only key to reduce time and quality issues. Automation will also assist organizations to craft their processes and keep it dynamic as the markets are changing.