Efficiency… What is it?
Efficient — achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
However is it really that important for an IT company? True, it sounds good that improving efficiency will help achieve goals and meet deadlines faster, but is it really true? What is the goal or purpose you are trying to achieve by being efficient or making the team efficient?
The only goal of IT sector, agree with me or not ,is to make money!! In fact it is the rule for any business. If a business has to succeed then it has to be profitable. Being efficient is just one of the ways to achieve that goal. If you don't make money there is no point of being efficient. The client/project is your source of income , and your job is to meet the needs of the client/project in a way which will help both the client and you. But this definitely does not mean that being efficient will help the project.
I have seen managers apply the supply chain principle in the IT industry- example if one issue takes on an avg 2 hours to complete ,then an employee should be able to resolve 4 issues in 8 hours. Also, if two people work on an issue and it takes them 4 hours to resolve, you have taken 8 hours to resolve one issue. But Supply Chain and IT industry both are different. Contrary to what logic suggests, I have seen that when the team was not working at complete efficiency , we were dealing with lesser backlog and issues and were handling more proactive solutions. On the other hand, in the months when we had higher efficiency ,months where all the resources worked for 8 hours or more daily ,on an avg, we usually would be dealing with a higher backlog defects or would be firefighting (prod issues)
In fact, I have now come to conclude that the resource utilization graph and efficiency graph are just charts which indicate the workload or the type of issues handled — higher the efficiency or resource utilization, easier issues or production issues, lower efficiency or resource utilization, difficult issues or proactive/out of the box solutions.
And finally what matters is the kind of work you provide to the client. Efficiency will help you resolve an issue in 10 minutes it may will not provide a permanent fix. Is efficiency an indicator of work performance really valid ?
