Ironically, companies that build world-class products for better efficiency and productivity for their clients and customers often don’t think the same for their employees. Companies hesitate to invest in tools that will make their employees more productive. They are still stuck with physical notepads, spreadsheets, manual code reviews, single screens, etc.
Anyone having doubts about the productivity levels of their teams should ask these questions:
- Do you feel more productive on a small screen or a big screen, with one screen or two?
- Would you rather provide updates multiple times or update it at a central place for everyone to refer to?
- Is writing down tasks, reminders, and deadlines, in a notebook is more easier or on a task management tool?
- Do you feel project management is easier on spreadsheets and Word docs or a project management tool?
Most people will have similar answers and yet companies hesitate to invest in productivity tools, except for (off course) the ‘timesheets’.
You can see this bias from startups to billion-dollar software companies. The reason is usually cost saving and ignorance. What companies don’t realize is that these tools are essential for their teams to be more efficient and productive and in the end will save them more money than they spend on these tools.
A code review should be done through automated tools and regularly, if not then you will pay for it (in extra effort) during QA, UAT, and Production.
A project manager should use a project management tool to manage deliveries, risks, issues, budget, etc. If she has to refer to this information from tens of spreadsheets and documents and emails then she is not in control of her project. The Monitoring and controlling part of project management will never happen efficiently and the project risks will increase.
The learning and knowledge-sharing sessions the companies conduct internally are not good enough and team members don’t always have time to attend them. Learning tools, where team members can learn at their own pace and time and what they think is essential is where a company should invest.
The productivity gains by using these tools will offset the cost of rework, bug fixes, inadvertent misses, additional efforts, and sometimes litigations.
A startup needs to use such tools as they want to save costs on hiring people. It’s necessary for corporate behemoths who have thousands of people, the productivity increase would save them thousands of dollars and will also make good financial sense.