What job title most represents the way your work day goes?
- 911 Operator: Watch call queue and handle next incoming.
- Team Member: Lots of meetings and interruptions to keep everybody on the same page.
- Isolationist: No email, no phone, focused on work.
Which method produces the best product for you team as individuals and as a corporate whole? I’d say you need all three.
Someone has to be the second or third tier of technical support for your production systems. If you created the systems, no one knows them better than your team. So, when the help desk isn’t enough, you need to have someone on 911 to handle the calls. But don’t think that an individual with production support is going to be as productive as others who not on call.
We need people to be Team Members and Isolationists. The problem is that those roles need to be performed by the same people. People in complete isolation create anarchy and knowledge silos. They become power brokers of things only they control. If you’re always in Team Member mode, then it’s hard to get any work done. Too many meetings and not enough focused time doing work result in a lot of agreements with nothing of substance ever produced. The same people need to use both modes at different times.
Perhaps we need better ways to communicate our mode. We need to protect the effort of our team members to be isolated. That doesn’t mean they don’t talk. I have found that team programming is one of the most effective ways to get into Airplane mode (no phone, no email, no instant messaging) because someone else is focusing with you. This isolation or airplane mode is very intense, and hard to keep up for an entire shift. So, it makes sense to divide your day into periods with different modes.
You could liken it to interval training for athletics. Periods of intense exertion separated with intervals of lighter exertion. You could do the same things with Team Member and Isolation modes.
Do you get enough time to focus? When you do, are you productive? Share your thoughts in our comments, or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben