Excerpt

Evaluating Work Velocity

How quickly a person must execute a task, or how frequently tasks hit a person, define velocity of work in the context of Be Nimble is my experience. There is a famous episode from the old I Love Lucy show called Lucy and the Chocolate Factory (available on YouTube), where Lucy and her friend Ethel decide to take jobs wrapping small chocolate candies. In the famous skit, the two women handle things well until the conveyor belt accelerates. The velocity eventually spells disaster for the two candy workers and provides a good laugh.

As with volume, tasks can be characterized as simple or difficult. Good organizational and position design should logically take both volume and velocity of work into account. Regrettably, this is not normally the case. Planners start with good intentions, studying the workflow steps between tasks and between people or workstations. They identify the elements and sub elements of each separate critical, and not so critical task, and then they assign time expectations to perform the work to their performance standard. This should be sufficient to guarantee success, but often is a shallow understanding of what is going to happen. Once the job or task is designed job postings are created, new employees are matched to these design elements and hired, or existing employees are rotated and placed in the new positions, all based on this design approach.

So why have I seen this approach not succeed in practice? There are a few reasons. One reason is evolution. Eventually, the meticulous, one time, position design effort grows stale or even obsolete. It fails to cope with an evolving new normal. Picture in your mind a dam built to withhold a set amount of river water. Everything is fine until a subtle multi-year climate shift occurs. The spring melt always delivered a predictable amount of water to the place where the dam stands tall, protecting the valley further down. Then, one spring, a rapid torrent of water slams into the face of the dam in a short amount of time. The dam’s original systems design may or may not have anticipated this climate change years in the future and it will Volume, Velocity, and Complexity remain to be seen if the structure can successfully bleed off the intense, non-standard flow using its control gates.

Lucy and Ethel experienced an increase in the pace of simple tasks, the challenge was speed and quality execution. The engineers who built the dam were challenged by an unexpected increase in water velocity that happens in the spring. In either example, velocity of work can destroy employee and leader morale and effectiveness as they struggle to keep up or deal with one rapidly occurring event. Some people are wired to do this well, think of air traffic controllers. As mentioned previously, I graduated from the Navy’s RADAR operator and air traffic control school before going on to SEAL training.

Our starting class in RADAR school was preselected through intense aptitude and IQ testing. My classmate and I were all capable, on paper, of succeeding. At the end of course only fourteen of the original thirty students graduated. The key discriminator? You guessed it, the ability to cope with rapidly changing information, observed and graded in real time, to a strict standard, at an ever-increasing velocity of target data delivery. Unlike work volume, challenges associated with velocity are easier to detect. In the Lucy example, velocity issues become comical and then dramatic.

Velocity failure is dramatic and very public. People are seen by their coworkers failing in critical ways and the company suffers. Many times, the failure (unlike volume failure which often elicits sympathy) to handle the velocity of work makes the leader or employee appear incompetent resulting in replacement, termination, or resignation by the affected person. The first two drivers of work stress and task management failure have each been difficult in their own way. Next, we’ll tackle the subject of work complexity. By now, you’ve probably figured out velocity of work isn’t my personal Achilles heel either.