Shovel vs. Backhoe – sometimes the shovel is the better choice

I’ve been bouncing between different projects and teams lately and encountering a range of work styles and to be honest a wide range of attitudes when it comes to getting work done.  An observation from these interactions is that teams and individuals really like to wait for the optimal solution or tool to come along and get the job done for them.  There seems to be a “reliance” on the automated tool to get a task completed and a project or task waits as said tool is created or delivered.  Reliance may or may not equal excuse in the previous sentence, depends on how mean you want to think of others.  In this case, I’ll just use reliance, it’s a good day today.

Without bragging, our team is not one to shy away from getting work done by any means possible.  So it kind of drives me crazy to not get work done by hand and instead wait for either a system upgrade or some coding to get done so the work can be done automatically.  Disclaimer: I’m also not ignorant to the fact that you can’t do everything by hand.

However, for an initial pass or to get someone to a point that they can get their work done, I have no problem putting in some extra effort and doing something the hard way to help the cause out.  The project that got me thinking was simple but exemplifies my concerns with work styles and speed in companies.  We were asked to put together a metrics report on traffic for one of our sites.  No big deal.  Good ‘ol Webtrends is capturing quite a bit of data and it’s all there.  The problem is that the current exported report is just not telling a clear story to stakeholders.  It’s a mountain of data that causes more trouble than good and it’s not getting the point across.

Our analyst asked if we could create a custom report that was straight to the point and easily digestible.  To me, this sounds like a reasonable request.  This report should generate some ideas, insights and provide enough data to make informed decisions for the next quarter.  And here’s where it turned into a question of a shovel or a backhoe.  To develop an automatic report was going to take a lot of time; effort is not a factor when it comes to a backhoe, it’s time.  So our option to use the backhoe was to sit and wait. I don’t know how long it was going to officially take, that’s another story – stick to your dates,  but based on past backhoe requests it  would be a long time and many quarters would have passed.  No other options were given; we were going to have to wait.

So why wait?  I offered to pick up my shovel and just dig through the data by hand for this first report and get it out the door in a couple of days.  Next quarter, we might have our automatic version ready to go, in fact based on our new template.  If the automatic version isn’t ready to go, well, we pick the shovel up and dig again.  This was met with enthusiasm and more importantly a sense of gratitude.  By putting in more effort, our team was going to meet the stakeholder needs and deliver something that helped the business.  One of the reason’s why I enjoy working in UX is that as a discipline I see that projects and ideas don’t just stop when obstacles are present.  Instead, as a practice we find a way to plow through difficult interactions, difficult strategies or designs by any means as possible and help our colleagues out.  I’d like to see others stop relying on excuses of not getting work done and instead start to tackle work head on and make some progress.  I know project leads and managers can get leery of double work but I don’t think the price of some extra work is more expensive than not working and losing credibility.

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