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Time is an invaluable resource; once it’s gone, we cannot get it back. As Catherine Pulsifer wisely noted, “We never know if we will have tomorrow.” Many professionals often express a lack of resources, leading to the familiar call to “prioritize.” However, it seems the real issue lies not in the scarcity of resources but in how we inefficiently allocate our time.
One intriguing way to measure this problem is through the concept of Bureaucratic Mass Index (BMI). This idea, inspired by established management metrics in companies like McDonald’s, assesses the time spent on activities that directly contribute to customer outcomes versus non-value-adding tasks. For instance, while unit-producing hours focus on actions like preparing food or developing features, non-unit producing hours might involve necessary but less impactful tasks, like compliance checks or inventory counting. Organizations typically strive to maximize their unit-producing hours by reducing non-value-adding activities.
BMI can be calculated with a simple formula that captures non-value-adding time as a percentage:
In this formula, NVA represents the time spent on tasks that do not directly contribute to value, such as attending meetings or waiting for approvals. W denotes the waiting time before productive work can resume, like waiting for infrastructure changes. Lastly, Total is the overall time available to the employee in a given period.
While BMI can offer insights into organizational waste, it’s rarely quantified. Leaders may perceive tracking BMI as a less glamorous task compared to announcing new initiatives. Furthermore, employees might hesitate to share how their time is spent, fearing it could reflect poorly on them. This hesitation is unfortunate, as employees often provide the clearest insights into bureaucratic inefficiencies. According to Harvard Business Review, many people mistakenly equate busyness with productivity, leading to a culture where “busy” is a common response to inquiries about one’s well-being.
Let’s Shift Our Focus to a Specific Role: The Developer
Despite widespread reports of a technical skills shortage, the issue is more complex. Research indicates that developers spend less than a third of their time actually coding, with some reports suggesting it could be as low as five hours a week!
So, What Can We Do to Enhance Productivity?
Coding Companions
The instinct might be to seek out cutting-edge technology to address productivity challenges. Fortunately, solutions exist. For those who’ve spent time coding, you might remember the countless hours spent on research or debugging, only to discover simple mistakes. Recently, AWS introduced Amazon Code Whisperer, an AI-driven coding assistant that allows developers to focus more on building and less on searching for answers. This tool has rekindled my enthusiasm for coding, enabling me to develop applications in 25% of the time it previously took, even when working with unfamiliar cloud services. Reports indicate that experienced developers have seen productivity boosts ranging from 30% to 57%.
Hidden Waste
While coding companions are a significant step forward, they only scratch the surface of the broader productivity issue. Historically, new technologies become truly effective only when accompanied by changes in workflow. So, how can we expand the available coding time?
To eliminate what lean practitioners refer to as waste, it’s crucial to investigate how work is actually performed. For instance, during a project at McDonald’s, we discovered over 160 handoffs between ideation and production. Although the development team operated in two-week sprints, the entire process spanned months, with many inefficiencies hidden from view. While everyone was busy, no one was accountable for speeding up the overall process—a common issue that only became apparent when we mapped the entire workflow.
Eliminating Waste
Three effective strategies for minimizing waste include (a) speeding up decision-making, (b) embracing healthy duplication, and (c) removing bottlenecks. Just as loosely coupled architectures facilitate better outcomes, improvements in these areas allow teams to work more independently—a principle we uphold at AWS, where we believe that “Dependencies are defects.”
Accelerating decision-making involves creating a shared understanding of how decisions should be made and pushing more decision-making down the organization. This approach focuses on speed and reversibility rather than the futile quest for the perfect choice.
Traditionally, duplication is seen as counterproductive, but at AWS, we embrace the notion that “2 > 0”—it’s preferable for two teams to pursue the same goal than for no one to tackle it due to slow decision-making. Over time, teams will naturally converge on a single solution, thus freeing up valuable time.
Addressing bottlenecks requires dedication and a willingness to experiment. For example, if you’re in infrastructure leadership, are you promoting self-service provisioning of compute resources like Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3, as the cloud was designed for, rather than relying on outdated ticketing processes? If you lead compliance, how can you automate validation in CI/CD pipelines? If you’re in security, consider whether your authentication solution can integrate seamlessly with a team’s needs. The aim is always to enhance how your team works while removing barriers.
Focus
While two-pizza (or two-product) teams aren’t a panacea, they help concentrate on achieving meaningful outcomes rather than merely completing tasks. By empowering teams to focus on results rather than being bogged down in siloed roles, we can acknowledge our limitations in multitasking. For instance, a developer might struggle to resolve complex issues if constantly switching contexts.
In a previous blog post, I touched on the waste created by waiting for others. Although developers can start new tasks during this downtime, it often leads to an overwhelming backlog of work. This is not the right approach.
For more guidance on avoiding common pitfalls, check out this insightful post on ways to avoid mistakes. Additionally, if you’re interested in a fresh perspective on performance management, SHRM provides valuable insights into this topic. Lastly, for those looking to delve deeper into Amazon’s hiring practices, this resource is excellent.