$300,000 bonus

There was a big road construction project over the weekend in California, with predictions of major travel disruptions around the area. However, things didn't turn out as expected, and the construction company earned a $300,000 bonus for finishing the job in 33 hours instead of the expected 56 hours.

So what would you do to get a project done sooner. Is this an effective way to run your technology project?

According to Daniel Pink in his book Drive, cash incentives won't motivate the team effectively. According to Pink, "if-then" rewards such as a bonus for getting done early, aren't effective in the long run. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced the  idea of flow, where intrinsic motivation takes over and the person is absorbed by the task at hand.

I recently took over a project that was "challenged." One of my steps has been to remove distractions from the project team so they can focus on the development tasks. I'm using Kanban to help with that, minimizing the work in progress and helping the team focus on what needs to be worked on next.  What should happen next is their efficiency goes up because they aren't multi-tasking and they can get to that point of becoming absorbed by a single user story and get into the flow. I think it will take a couple more weeks to really know how effective my approach is, but throughput seems to be going up so far. This is good, since I don't have $300k to give the team.

How are you motivating people

I just finished watching a presentation on Ted by Daniel Pink on motivation in the workplace. He sited a study that found that for anything other than simple mechanical tasks, the higher the reward, the poorer performance got.

He mentioned three things to motivate people effectively; autonomy, master, and purpose.

• Autonomy is the desire in people to have control over our own lives
• Mastery is the desire to continue to improve on a skill or set of skills
• Purpose is feeling like your part of something important, something bigger than yourself

As I listened to this, I realized he was describing the team structure in agile project management. The team is self-directed, deciding among themselves how they are going to accomplish the work as opposed to being assigned tasks from a command & control project manager. Along with this, they are self-motivated and empowered to learn and improve their skills. Finally, any good project starts with a vision, defining the purpose for their work.

When I'm giving presentations, I talk a lot about how you can improve productivity by following an agile process. I often refer to a study done by the Standish group about how many software features are never used (45%) and that by not building features that aren't used through a prioritized backlog, you increase productivity.

This study provides another reason why agile works; the agile team is motivated the right way to perform rather than provided incentives that have the opposite effect. So next time you're trying to get your team engaged, think about this. Are you going to throw money at them or provide the intrinsic motivators that will really get them to perform?