Bulldozer00's Blog

In part I, we saw that the learning curve for each person is different (duhhh). I also defined the Critical Mass Time (CMT) to be the time lag between starting a new project and actually being able to “start contributing something useful”. The figure below recaps this idea.

Other factors, besides experience and expertise, that determine the CMT value are: the amount of, the quality of, and accessibilty of pre-existing information about the problem to be solved. If the information is sparse, fragmented, and/or inefficiently stored in other people’s fallible memories (tribal knowledge) because of the failure of management to lead, then the CMT will be larger than if  the critical-to-success information is coherent, integrated, and recorded somewhere that is easily navigable and accessible.

At the CMT point, productivity starts manifesting in the physical world as visible intermediate work outputs. Product specifications, designs, test definitions, equipment assembly, prototyping, model definitions, etc., begin to emerge and push the project forward. Like any activity that is predicated on fallible human thought, the creation process is iterative and chaotic. It is not smooth and organized as the final output may imply to an after-the-fact external observer (like most managers). It takes iterative, mistake-prone work and structure to temporarily harness the ever present increase in entropy.

The figure below shows the full time lag between project start and project completion. Again, the time lag ‘tween CMT and project “done” is highly person-specific.

The figure below shows the end-to-end project start time to project done time for three different people that were given the same project task to perform. The difference between the total “schedule” performance of person 3 and person 2 is the case we want to zoom in on. How could it be that person 2 ramped up faster than person 3 but finished the project later? WTF?

Some reasons that may explain this anomaly are:

• Person 3 had a hard time finding and absorbing high quality, pre-existing information about the project and task at hand.
• Person 3 is slower at learning, but more talented at applying.
• Person 2 lost some motivation for one or more reasons and slacked off somewhat
• Person 3 rushed through the task and produced crappy output that may not be discovered until the project is further downstream; where the cause might not be connectable to the person’s output.

I’m sure that there are a gazillion other factors that may explain the anomaly. You can form your own list.

The main point of this article was to discuss what everyone knows, but often forgets: Numbers don’t always tell the truth. Superficially looking at hard and cold “schedule performance” numbers without digging in to examine their validity can be unfair to those who are quantitatively measured for personal performance evaluation by hierarchs. Lazy bozo managers who do this deserve what they get: the exodus of some of their best performers, an unmotivated workforce, a low quality product portfolio, and an unfair reward system. In essence, it’s one of the hallmark characteristics of the herd of mediocracies that cover the landscape of the business community.

Each person naturally has a different learning curve. When an engineer is assigned a new task to perform on a new technical project, there will be a lag in productivity because, well,  it’s new to him/her. The person needs time to learn and understand the context surrounding the project and the details of the problem to be solved. Since each person is different, each person will have a different time-to-productivity, or Critical Mass Time (CMT). The graphic below shows a typical learning curve for a specific person. The slope increases with time because as new learning occurs, it feeds on itself and the acquisition of knowledge gets easier.

The CMT is a physically underive-able function of the experience and expertise (two independent qualities) of a person. It is also a function of the area of overlap between those two attributes and the novelty/depth of the problem to be solved. As the figure below shows, the person-specific CMT is at its minimum when there is 100% overlap. Note that if there is no overlap, the CMT is essentially infinity. This sad state can happen, for example, if a Radio Frequency circuit designer is assigned the task of designing and writing product software, or a plumber is assigned to perform brain surgery, or an enterprise IT software engineer is assigned the task of writing embedded signal processing software. It’s easy to find other examples of total mismatch.

Assuming that the experience and expertise of each person in a group of people overlaps somewhat with the project task that needs to be performed (no cases where CMT = infinity), the graphic below shows how CMT differences within the group can vary radically. Obviously, if you were a manager, you’d like to have Person 1 working the problem.

So what happens when an executive manager or marketer commits the company to a scheduled project completion date without knowing the learning curves of his/her people, or the difficulty of the problem to be solved? As the figure below shows, blown schedules occur. Before (and after) the schedule is missed, increasing pressure-to-complete is continuously exerted by management, mistrust grows, and the employee-management relationship suffers. Of course, since management is (at least) one level removed from the action and they don’t have to perform the task themselves, they are blameless. Because of the FAE, the employee, of course, is fully at fault and a “performance improvement” plan may be in order. If an employee ruffles feathers and dares to publicly point out the mismatch, accusations of “not being a team player“, “malcontent“, and/or “bad attitude” are the thanks he/she gets. If the employee persists, the ostracism may be followed by a stronger message to STFU – a required trip to “people-skills school“.

This pattern of dysfunctional behavior occurs so often in hierarchical corpos across the land that it is taken for granted and it is “undiscussable“. It is also one of the reasons why people do everything they can to get out of the pig sty and climb the corpo ladder to succes. The further away from the action you move, the higher the chance that  you’ll be sanctioned by the big boys(gals) to convert from a pressure-receiver into a pressure-exerter. As an added bonus, you’ll make more money because of your “increased responsibilities” (sic).