Deep Work, Support and Quality Per Hour - Cultivated Management
Hi,
Welcome to this week’s Cultivated Management newsletter.
I’ve been pretty quiet recently on social media and the newsletter - partly due to summer holidays and partly due to a new book I’ve read. More on that later.
So in this newsletter I have some thoughts about quality per hour, an update from the blog and a new book of the week that will make you think deeply about your own work.
Quality per hour
No matter what you do as a manager there will be somebody, somewhere, who believes they can ship value faster than you. Speed is important, right? Go faster, deliver more, move fast.
“I can ship this in half the time”
“Why does it take so long to ship it?”
As much as I believe in speed and agility, I also believe in doing things rights and producing good value. Faster isn't always better, not if you have to trade off getting it right. (Of course, some companies are trying to test their market so they may trade off quality for market presence in a strategic way).
If you ship poor software/products/service it will come back to you, and usually this costs you more in the long run. This returning work (also known as Failure Demand) is really easy to measure but few managers do, and few managers tie this failure demand to early failures, often caused by moving too fast; such as skipping process, not training people properly, not thinking things through, not listening to people, rushing to get things done, hiring the wrong people, etc.
This failure demand not only generates more work but it can literally destroy your relationships with your customer.
A guiding principle that is worth considering is to focus on getting it right first time if you can. And that means talking about "Quality Per Hour/Day/Release" rather than any other metric.
Quality per [time] is a much better metric to talk about because it encapsulates the fact that this work will likely not come back to cause failure demand.
Shipping the right thing first time makes the world of your customer so much more effective too. And that should mean that makes your life as a manager better too.
Book of the week
This week I’ve just finished reading a very excellent book called Deep Work* by Cal Newport. I’ve been following Cal for a long time on his blog Study Hacks where he writes about learning, creating and productivity.
What amazes me is the fact that Cal has generated a huge following on his blog without any presence on social media. Instead of dabbling with social media he focusses his time on Deep Work. In this world of knowledge work and sketchy measures of productivity, it’s often easy to spend your time doing little of value and justifying it - I’ve seen this first hand. Cal argues for more focus on doing Deep Work - disconnected, time bound, focused work.
It’s a great book and it will make you think about what is really important in work and life. Hence the reason I have spent less time on social media and more time on creating valuable products.
Holidays always give you time to switch off and think about your life. My recent holiday combined with reading Deep Work has given me a new focus for the next 6 months. I’ll be shipping value rather than tweets.
I realised that when the time comes to look back on my life, I want it to be filled with the memories of time spent with family, the knowledge I’ve helped a company exceed and grow, the knowledge I’ve helped managers rock their careers and the tangible products I know I need to ship (this blog, video series, books, websites, conference presentations).
I know when the time comes to look back I don’t want to look back and see a few core valuable products (this blog) surrounded by a ridiculous number of social media updates. The balance is out.
The book is an eye opener. You can buy it here on Amazon.
On the blog this week
This week I wrote about building and creating a Product/Service support team. It’s an old article that I found on an old CD-ROM - shows how long ago I wrote this. It’s an article I wrote with a colleague of mine after we’d done some work building a support team. After reading it I was struck with how relevant this advice still is, even though it was written about 18 years ago!
If you’re at all involved in creating a support team then this guide should help you.
The article is here : http://cultivatedmanagement.com/building-support-team/
Until next week.
Take care everyone and go forth and do Deep Work.
Rob
(*All Amazon links in these emails are affiliate links which means I receive a tiny commission payment should you buy the products. You pay the same price, it just helps to support this site.)