Last week, Ryan Latta offered a fascinating metric on LinkedIn: the number of times a leader taps a developer on the shoulder for “something real quick.”
That kind of interruption makes it impossible for the team to achieve a regular cycle time. Worse, it creates aging. So more leaders want to know “why is everything so late and so slow? What’s wrong with the team?”
Nothing is wrong with the team except for this: servicing the interruption while “everyone” expects them to finish all the work.
I realized I used to ask people to do this themselves on a pad of paper. That way, people could learn how much time they spent servicing those interruptions. I took different actions as a project manager vs as a people manager. As a project manager, I asked everyone to come to me, and I would protect their project time. (See the chart for when people are assigned to the project in Are We There Yet?: Creating Project Dashboards to Display Progress or in Manage It! or a slightly different conversation in Agile Project Manager, Scrum Master, or Product Owner? for more information.)
But seeing the interruptions matters.
Then, Nicole Derr explained how she asked a team to create interruption cards that happened to be a different color than the cards on their team board. (Brilliant!) Everyone could see the interruptions vs the planned work. She suspected the organization was outgrowing its process.
I then remembered I’d seen that behavior before when I taught a project portfolio workshop. Senior management wanted to be able to change the strategy much faster than the teams could finish anything. As a result, this relatively small organization had way more projects (and feature sets) in flight than they had people or teams to complete the work.
Interruptions Are Qualitative and Quantitative Data
Interruptions are “bad” in the sense that they increase WIP, decrease throughput, and increase aging. (See Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers.) But that quantitative data is not the end. Instead, it’s the beginning.
Why do leaders tap developers on the shoulder? What do they need from the product development teams that they are not yet getting? Is that an issue of culture? Product or corporate strategy? Maybe the team needs a facilitative leader that protects the team from management mayhem because no one ever told these managers, “no.”
Interruptions are an excellent signal of potential problems. We can listen to those interruptions and learn to see the effects on our work.
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