What does overtime say about your schedule?

I was recently talking to a waterfall project manager about a cultural divide between his two teams – or at least that is what I thought the topic was. The conversation started off with this project manager explaining to me that it is too difficult to have remote teams in different countries as there are a lot of cultural differences. I asked for him to say more and he said, “I don’t know what to do with that team in [insert any location]. They just don’t have the work ethic of our [insert any US city] team.”

The conversation evolved into a lament about the non-US team going home on Fridays at 17:00 and not working over the weekend or even checking email and staying in touch when the project required constant long hours and care and feeding.

The person explaining this situation truly believed that the problem was work ethic. He was absolutely shocked when I said that weekend overtime work said more about the project schedule, customer expectations and project management than it did about the remote team. I further elaborated that a properly managed schedule whether it is waterfall or agile, resulted in normal business hours on normal business days not overtime on evenings on weekends and that even if in the case of a software product that required off-hours deployment, work schedules should be adjusted to accommodate for the time; not add extra time. I further pushed the envelope by suggesting that holidays or meant to allow the team to recharge and they should not be encouraged to check in when they are off the clock. The manager, in this case, needs to lead by example.

Needless to say, my response was not popular with this individual, but it is one that I will always give. In order for teams to sustain a consistent pace of work, they need to know where the schedule boundaries are. They should never be cajoled into taking on more work than they can do in the allotted cycle, nor made to feel guilty for not pushing themselves to the breaking point to meet unrealistic expectations. Whether it is a Sprint or a phase on a project schedule, the team’s availability, velocity, and cadence of working needs to be taken into account and if an estimate for example was terribly of or a problem more difficult to solve than anticipated, it is the job of the project manager or the Scrum Master to negotiate new priorities and assist with removing roadblocks to success.

My call to action for you is to review your schedules and pace of work. Are you putting the team at risk for burn out? What can you do to change?

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About the Author:

INDRA A. BOOKS

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