Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

This should be a quick one; I've got to write down the thought before I forget it.

George, What Are You Talking About Now?!

I was talking with a couple of engineers in my group today about the projects they will be working on this fiscal year and their work load. I want to make sure that they are plenty busy but not so busy that they begin thrashing. I find that, when people in our organization get goaled on a huge volume of projects, what suffers is the overall quality of work. That's bad because we work in an organization where our deliverables are directly used by Sun's customers so shoddy work means less benefit to customers. I don't want that.

Yeah, Sure, But What Is Your Point?

My point is this: giving you too many projects to do makes you effectively stupid (is that an oxymoron? ...well, stay with me here). You don't take the time to learn thoroughly about how any single project works. And since our added value is from understanding how our partners' products work on Sun, we stop adding value. We're not able to answer the little questions about why this works better than that, why a customer should use this server versus that one, why you should run the software configured this way and not that way. We become stupid. We know just enough to get the project done, but not enough to speak with deep authority on anything.

What Is The Lesson Here, Then?

The lesson that I learned from today's conversations is that if I want quality work to be delivered from my folks and myself, I'm much better off giving them fewer projects to complete with higher-quality end deliverables than more projects to complete poorly. It seems obvious when I say it that way, but I think that we've just been telling everybody to do more work without clearly thinking about how it affects each individual project. Turns out, when you don't spend much time on a project, you tend not to learn as much which means you have less opportunity to provide actual value. That's my thought.