Limiting operational work

November 23, 2009

In MPU we have found that our day-to-day operational work seems to consistently take up about a third of our available effort. We would really like to reduce this and spend the time on more development work and possibly even fit in some personal development… We’ve tried various approaches but as yet there has been no big reduction. Our new idea is to limit the days each week on which we can do operational work. I will be doing Monday and Tuesday, Chris will be doing Thursday and Friday, we will have emergency cover only on Wednesday. This puts a limit on the time available in any week for operational work of 40%,that is clearly more than we are aiming for but hopefully we won’t spend all of our 2 days on just the operational work. Wednesday morning tends to be a meeting most weeks so that leaves 2.5 days to be devoted to nothing but development work. The hope is that this will help us prioritise our operational work and avoid lots of distractions when we are developing new stuff. We will have to see how it pans out.