Almost all my clients to date have been understaffed.

They are already spending a good chunk of change on their employees and contractors, who perform business- critical functions. And there's always more good work that they don't get to.

Accordingly, they try to maximize the time their staff spend doing valuable work. Makes sense, right? The organization wants to see a return on the cost of employing them.

To that end, managers (whose work also doesn't come cheap) attempt to allocate people's time toward tasks and projects.

For instance, Alex, a highly-skilled DBA, is only needed half the time on the Blue Team, but he can spend the other half helping the Green Team and the Red Team.

This approach implicitly assumes that the return on Alex's time — i.e. his usefulness or productivity — is proportional to the time he spends on projects. After all, he's competent, motivated, and wouldn't waste company time. So every minute he's on a task, he's being useful.

Again, makes sense, right?

Sure, if Alex were a computer.

Because Alex is human, he will not be all that productive, and so would his team-mates. Here are just four reasons:

• When he switches from project A to B, he needs some time to catch up on B's happenings. This isn't like synchronizing a smartphone; it takes time and often involves asking people (which lowers their output).


• Inevitably, his bonds with the Blue Team members (and the Red, and the Green) are weaker. He's just not around enough, and when he is, he's this "expert". This often translates into reduced collaboration, trust and knowledge-sharing.


• Alex has no slack time in which to come up with new ideas or simplifications. He might not have the bandwidth to consider that perhaps they're building the wrong feature.


• The Blue Team needs him for 50% on average. What happens the week he's needed for 80%? Either he becomes the bottleneck, so Blue suffers, or he spends that time with Blue but then Red or Green suffer. That's where we get a flurry of management activity and emails, none of which gets deducted from anyone's "productivity".

What about the costs you see only much later? A few months of this and Alex burns out, asks to be removed, or leaves the company?

You don't have to be shared across projects for this kind of utilization to kill you and your productivity. You can be 100% on one project and constantly busy doing what needs doing. Often, results include apathy, procrastination, and superficial solutions. Exactly the opposite of what utilization was meant to achieve.

So what can you do? Stop "maximizing utilization". Even your computer's operating system avoids 100% CPU.

What matters is overall team output — the value they produce — not individual productivity. Individual usefulness and effectiveness are important.

How do you get great value? First, let your teams self-organize around delivering it. Then look for waste and bottlenecks in your process, and remove them gradually. You'll be amazed.