In software development, efficiency is incredibly important. Perhaps even more so than productivity. In this Tech in 2, Senior Consultant Jennifer Butler explains why and shares three tips for driving efficiency in your software development teams.
Three Tips to Drive Efficiency
Productivity and efficiency are different. Productivity is when you have a work product and are making things happen. Efficiency is only having to do it once or doing it right the first time or within a few times. If you’re being productive, you could end up touching the same thing four or five times because you didn’t work through it efficiently. In software development, it’s really important to not have to go back and review to make sure that things are complete so that you can continue moving on to the next phase.
Prioritize Tasks
Prioritization of tasks really helps with efficiency because then you can understand what needs to happen in what order, how important it is for the rest of the project to keep moving and it helps to cross things off the list so that they’re not hanging out there waiting for someone to touch them. If you can cross it off, it’s done. You don’t have to touch it again. You move on.
Realistic Goals
Setting realistic goals and timelines is honestly a very difficult thing to do. Everybody wants to think that they’ll be able to devote their time, go heads down and get in there and get it done, but there are distractions. Distractions come up all the time. So you need to consider and give yourself a little bit of grace when estimating how long it’s going to take you to complete the work.
Reset & Recharge
If you take the time to walk away, take a break, get some fresh air, you’ll come back refreshed and more able to focus and restart what you walked away from.
The ultimate goal of efficiency is to be better at what you do and to be able to do more. If you do what you need to accomplish efficiently, then you have more time to develop yourself, your professional, personal and leadership skills and you can teach what you’ve learned by being efficient to others so they can do it as well.
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