Confusions Galore
A certain department, which exists in most modern organization, loves the term 'Productivity'. It immediately starts thinking of measuring productivity, creating a metrics, and plotting some scatter diagrams and pie charts. Then they get into creating historical data and mass hysteria in the organization. People start beefing up their code - adding more comments, or splitting statements into multiple lines etc. etc. Reason? is there a better measure of productivity than LoC?? Or is it the time sheets that people fill up? Or maybe the card swipe time stamps.
But the question is - what is productivity?
What is Productivity?
Most definitions of productivity state that it is a measure of output per unit input. But in the IT world, an absolute measure of productivity may not be very relevant, but a way to measure it relatively, over a period of time, across different projects or across geographies may be more useful.
I will leave the measurement of productivity - relative or absolute - to the process experts. My point of interest is productivity management - how to increase productivity in such a way that any method of measurement would clearly indicate the difference.
It is relatively easy to manage productivity in labor intensive environment. It is also much easier to measure any increase or decrease. In such an environment, a lot depends on the physical aspects such as tools and processes. The needs are also relatively simple - usually lying in the bottom of the Maslow's hierarchy pyramid and hence much easier to provide.
But, in the world of software development, the game is very different. The 'work' is more creative and the needs of the 'workers' are more towards the upper layers of the pyramid.
Let me provide an analogy - how do you manage the productivity of an artist - say a painter. You can make her sit in front of the canvas, with all the tools - brushes, paints and oils. But can you make her up with a new idea at your command?
But there is another painter - who paints large hoardings (a rare species now since the advent of low cost printing on large, non-tear-able media). He can paint at your command - you give him the copy of the advertisement to be painted and he will reproduce the same with skill.
Now lets extend this to the software development environment. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. Internationalization of a software product often requires changing char (8 bits) to wchar (16 bits). The productivity in such an activity can be measured by the number of 'fixes' per hour and a incentive linked target can easily achieve the required productivity (exceptions are always there - in programming as well as real life).
2. Debugging an intermittent crash in a software code (maybe due to a memory leak) - this can be done in a long way - checking each variable and tracing it through the code - this may take weeks or months - in a complex software product. But an expert will use her understanding of the code, experience, analytical thinking to zero in on the suspected segments of code and find the bug in a matter of minutes or hours.
So, what is the difference that I am trying to illustrate? You can push/force/entice someone to make a well defined change across the code, but the same methods of push/force/entice will not make a person conjure up analytical thinking, or recall the relevant experiences. The person has to feel that he or she needs to solve this bug. This is called 'Motivation'.
