3 posts tagged with "productivity"

The average engineering manager spends 4 hours per week shuffling Jira tickets. Not planning, not 1:1s — triaging, reminding, closing stale, and chasing down fields people forgot to fill. We surveyed 31 EMs across our B2B customers; 27 of them named Jira as their single biggest time sink after meetings.

Atlassian ships a reasonably capable automation engine in every Jira plan (yes, even Standard). Teams ignore it. Or worse, they use it for one rule — auto-close on "Done" — and miss the 11 that matter. What follows is a set of 12 rules that, together, cut the EM's Jira admin load from 4h/week to around 40 minutes. We've used variants of these at PanDev Metrics in our own engineering org and across three on-prem customer deployments.

Research on context switching shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. Now multiply that by five projects, each with its own Slack channel, Jira board, and stakeholder expectations. You're an outsourcing PM managing five projects for five different clients. Each client thinks their project is your top priority. And every Monday morning, you spend the first two hours trying to remember where each project left off on Friday.

Sound familiar? This is the multi-project management problem — and it's the defining challenge of outsourcing project management.

McKinsey's research on developer productivity found that software engineers spend only 25-30% of their working hours on active coding. The rest goes to meetings, planning, waiting, and context switching. In outsourcing, where every hour has a direct revenue implication, this split matters enormously. Your company has 40 developers. You bill clients for their time. But how much of each developer's available time is actually billable? If the answer is "I'm not sure," you have a profitability blind spot that could be costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Developer utilization is the single most important financial metric in outsourcing. And most companies measure it wrong — or don't measure it at all.