In this economy we see it every day. Either a company is shaving workers off their workforce and continuing to operate as if nothing has happened or their not hiring new workers to handle increases in work. Either way, this concept of doing a lot more work with fewer workers – which is what both scenarios play out to be – is dangerous and needs to be looked at in further detail.
When I first came to Las Vegas as the Corporate IT Application Development Manager for one of the largest gaming organizations in the world I was surprised by the size and composition of their IT department. Small development staff, no real project management structure in place, and a wildcat IT director who decided he needed to tell me on my first day who he wanted to fire before I had a chance to even assess the team. I know, I should have taken off right there and headed back the Midwest, but I do like challenges.
To make a long story short, I could see the imminent merger with another casino and left prior to that actually happening. And the IT director got his just desserts when most of the IT staff of the purchased organization (my former company) was let go. He liked to brag about doing more with less, but what we had was an IT department that was beleaguered, overworked, beaten down, and scared for their jobs most of the time. It wasn’t something to be proud of, yet he was. It’s not the type of organization I like to run – that’s for sure.
When you try to do too much with too little in the name of cost savings or personal glory, you often risk the following:
- A frustrated, overworked staff.
- High staff turnover.
- Adding additional risks into your project that must be identified, analyzed, and mitigated or avoided.
- Decreased costs initially followed by increased costs and decreased profitability.
- Poor or incomplete output.
- An unusable final solution.
The list can probably go on and on. Everytime I’ve witnessed and organization obviously and outwardly trying to do too much with too little, failure was eventually the end result.