Leveraging six simple collaboration and time management techniques can provide a 10% productivity improvement. Author Tony Schwartz says “Manage your energy, not your time.” What would you do with 10% productivity improvement? Come learn the techniques and let’s find out.

1. Lean Project Delivery
What would you do with 10%
productivity improvement
Troy Bitter
January 2014

2. Introducing Troy Bitter
• Senior Manager Consultant @ Sogeti
• Nearly 2 decades in IT, predominantly
project management
• Over 5 years of experience applying these
techniques
• Involved in local project management and
agile communities
• PMI Director for PMI-ACP certification
training
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3. Abstract
Too many people are still working after 5:00pm, either at the
office or later at home. The lack of successful production and
the resulting chaos from falling behind in work can make us feel
stressed and pressured. The feelings can lead to an even further
drop in productivity and quality, because the situation becomes
more tense and we feel like the work can never be caught up.
Tired minds and bodies are more prone to error. No one wants
those errors in their documentation, code, or test cases.
Leveraging six simple collaboration and time management
techniques can provide a 10% productivity improvement. Author
Tony Schwartz says “Manage your energy, not your time.”
What would you do with 10% productivity improvement? Come
learn the techniques and let’s find out.
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4. History of 8-hour Day
Thank Henry Ford when in
1914 he cut the workday to 8
hours
… doubled worker’s pay,
which resulted in
INCREASED productivity and
HIGHER profits
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5. Techniques
Collaboration
Concurrency
Project
Inspection
A Better Result
Time Management
Continuous Improvement
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6. Let’s Make Dinner
Cut
potatoes
Cook
potatoes
Cook
steak
Cook
vegetables
Eat
Serve
vegetables
Serve
steak
Serve
potatoes
Reality
How do we really
make dinner?
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7. Concurrency
Plan overlap of development and test execution activities
• Provides feedback/defect identification earlier in the
process. Time proximity -- testing more closely to
when it was developed so it’s fresh in mind still
• Test execution will be less scrunched by potential late
development delivery of a big bang solution
• Already overlap design/development with test case
creation for schedule efficiencies. This expands that
mindset
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8. Collaboration
Perform a paper review of
test cases by developers
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9. Riddle
What is more precious
than gold but cannot be
bought, earned, or saved?
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain
down.
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10. Time Management
Right Focus
Right-Size
Meetings
Right
Medium
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11. Continuous Improvement
Retrospectives are high
powered “lessons learned”
sessions that conclude with
actionable items.
• Opportunity for the entire
team to communicate,
refocus, and realign
• All decisions need to be
actionable and assigned.
“We’ll try harder” is not
actionable
• At least monthly for data to
be fresh and to get value
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12. Without Feedback …
Process is only as good as it is followed
and adjusted
Automation is NOT a substitution for a good process
GIGO – Good In Good Out. Enhances good. Also
speeds up a bad process
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13. Techniques
Collaboration
Concurrency
• Deliver the most valuable things
first
• Team over process
• Right overlap / concurrency
Project
Inspection
• Organize work to enable inspection
(validation of done)
A Better Result
Time Management
• Right-size meetings
• Right-size requirements
• Timeboxing
Continuous Improvement
• Do, Evaluate, Learn, Improve
• Actionable learnings
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14. Increasing Productivity
The old paradigm focused on early starts, working harder, adding bodies. It’s not
about that. With fewer obstacles and increased focus, we can accomplish the goal
more easily.
Who is going to win?
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15. Closing
Questions
tbitter@us.sogeti.com
www.linkedin.com/in/troybitterky/
513-655-7432
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16. I in Team
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17. Useful Resources
• Management Myth 15: I Need People to
Work Overtime by Johanna Rothman (link)
• The 8-hour workday doesn’t really work by
Jeff Haden, 2013 (link)
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