I agree that knowledge workers will be more productive if they reframe their time spent working to match their ability to focus on a task, but the logistical challenges behind managing people who work in this way would be a nightmare- it is easy to say that you would only track outcomes; perhaps I am not visionary enough but I think that the challenge is far greater than the author suggested.
I managed a software dev team this way - by outcomes. It worked great - at least from a developer productivity perspective. I knew my devs, knew who worked steadily and who worked according to a Dirac delta function (one guy was particularly spiky and narrow, and he could cobble together library code like nobody else) and who were in-between, and knew how to manage them and what to task each with.
(FYI, RP, "spiky and narrow", was "I need this at the end of the day"; XY was "disappear for a week, come back with what I asked for and a mind-blowing +1 we couldn't have predicted"; CC was "disappear for two weeks and return with the most beautifully architected, extensible, factory-based systems that were rock solid, customer ready, no costly bugs, ever".)
Where it didn't work so well? We were part of a PS shop, with billability targets and revenue expectations. It took some finesse to map the above behaviours to billable hours. My boss was tacitly on-board (he knew the personalities of my team, didn't ask how I managed them, and appreciated the results) but his boss, our VP, didn't know and it would have been dangerous for him to know.
So there are risks involved.
When my boss moved within the company, I followed him, RP followed me, and we did amazing things in an environment where that management style could be public knowledge (we were out of PS and out of billable revenue days and into a SaaS/SoA sort of thing, basically priced by value to the customer, before those were buzzy).
Hmm, there may be some information leakage in this post - but RP, XY, and CC know who they are. Great team.
[+] [-] Articulate|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterWhittaker|12 years ago|reply
(FYI, RP, "spiky and narrow", was "I need this at the end of the day"; XY was "disappear for a week, come back with what I asked for and a mind-blowing +1 we couldn't have predicted"; CC was "disappear for two weeks and return with the most beautifully architected, extensible, factory-based systems that were rock solid, customer ready, no costly bugs, ever".)
Where it didn't work so well? We were part of a PS shop, with billability targets and revenue expectations. It took some finesse to map the above behaviours to billable hours. My boss was tacitly on-board (he knew the personalities of my team, didn't ask how I managed them, and appreciated the results) but his boss, our VP, didn't know and it would have been dangerous for him to know.
So there are risks involved.
When my boss moved within the company, I followed him, RP followed me, and we did amazing things in an environment where that management style could be public knowledge (we were out of PS and out of billable revenue days and into a SaaS/SoA sort of thing, basically priced by value to the customer, before those were buzzy).
Hmm, there may be some information leakage in this post - but RP, XY, and CC know who they are. Great team.