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The workplace is where people go to work. But much of the day is increasingly padded out with less productive activities, writes Peter Fleming. A few years ago a disturbing story appeared in the media that seemed to perfectly capture the contemporary experience of work and its ever increasing grip over our lives: "Man Dies at Office Desk - Nobody Notices for Five Days".
The case was unnerving for one reason mainly. People die all the time, but usually we notice. Are things so bad in the modern workplace that we can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead? Of course, the story turned out to be a hoax. An urban myth.
As it happens, each country has its own variation that still fools people when they periodically appear. In the US the dead person is a publisher. In other countries, a management consultant.
Apart from getting the actual task done, which is typically completed in short bursts, there is also a good deal of messing about, chatting, paying the bills, surfing the net, daydreaming and waiting for the day to finish. Most importantly, much of our day is spent busy being busy rather than doing things that are socially useful.
A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually "faked" an 80-hour work week. For various reasons these individuals pretended to sacrifice themselves on the altar of work and still got everything done.
In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world. For those economists trying to figure out the present "productivity puzzle" in the UK, best start looking here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232
[Source]: http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/may/why-do-people-waste-so-much-time-at-the-office
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:27PM
Yes well it is obvious, I'm sure, to anyone with a brain that "agile" and "sprint" are just managerdroid-speak for "we're going to pretend if we change a few words around suddenly it magically won't consume time to do things."
And you're right about "effort". Our project management system is supposed to have a bunch of tasks for every project. But of course that would mean work for the PMs to detail out all those tasks. So instead we get a single task named "Project Work Effort Reporting". Clearly you're not supposed to do anything, other than report your "effort". And of course once you've reported an amount equal to the absurdly-randomly-predicted "effort", the project will be done, right?
Since all they really want to hear is "yes, it's done" I've learned to just say "yes, it's done." A day or two later they will come back and say "but it doesn't do X" to which I respond "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X."
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:38PM
Thankfully we don't have the "Project Work Effort Reporting" - and for full disclosure, my own product manager appears to have a reasonable contempt for this, so that these days my kick-offs are about 30 minutes to an hour long, and generally "effort" involves him asking "how long will this take?", listening to the reply, believing it, and dicking around with priorities and otherwise leaving us alone. This is a blessed relief after the year before it, and most likely after he's either moved on or succumbed to the bullshit, especially as the (junior) member of staff who has been appointed "SCRUM master" is predictably, tediously and nauseatingly gung-ho for this crap.
I think I might start trying the "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X." I might drop "finally" - that would lend a wonderful ambiguity as to whether (as they believe) they had provided a requirement at the start, or whether they've only just provided one now, without getting me accused of criticising management....
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:49AM
Yes well it is obvious, I'm sure, to anyone with a brain that "agile" and "sprint" are just managerdroid-speak for "we're going to pretend if we change a few words around suddenly it magically won't consume time to do things."
Duh, of course it won't consume as much time. "Agile" and "sprint" are fast words! Naming your meetings with fast words mean they get done faster, anybody knows that. It's just like a joke I made recently about people using Apple's Swift language because the name obviously means everything's faster -- development, testing, and performance, all faster! -- because sometimes people really do believe that sort of nonsense.
See also the tendency to rename companies and products to get rid of bad reputation. Fix the problems? Nah, just rename it and hope nobody notices.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:00PM
Since all they really want to hear is "yes, it's done" I've learned to just say "yes, it's done." A day or two later they will come back and say "but it doesn't do X" to which I respond "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X."
This. I always ended up having to slap something together that included all the vague ideas that came from management, then adjusting it finally to do what they actually wanted and get rid of the rest. Some wasted work, but much less frustrating than trying to pin down management ahead of time.