Thrashing: The Productivity and Company Killer

A struggling management team becomes completely reactive in every decision they make. They abandon long term plans for short term gains. Managers start taking resources away from established projects and putting them on special projects. Ultimately, the organization reaches a point where employees are spending more time moving from one project to another, causing projects to be cancelled before they can be completed. The team feels like they are just spinning their wheels. These are clear indications that the company is suffering from thrashing.

Thrashing is actually a computer term. It describes a scenario where a hard drive receives a series of requests and the device has to spend more time moving the read heads from one place of the disk to another than it does reading data from the disk. The overall productivity of the device is diminished and it takes longer to service the requests than if the requests were organized in order to minimize the amount of relocating that takes place.

Thrashing happens to organizations as well. It can have different disguises based on the type of organization. I experienced first-hand one start-up company with a nine month engineering project which ended up dragging out for 18 months. Sales opportunities were up, but close ratios were down. Support and sales organizations became confused over what the current priorities were and found themselves unable to properly prepare for anything that managed to get completed. The list of examples could go on and on.

There are four tips for avoiding thrashing within your organization. First, sell what you have. Most start-ups sell their product based on promises of a project. Keep these sales projects to an absolute minimum or make sure you can incorporate the functionality into the next planned release. As a believer in the 80/20 rule, you cannot afford to let these side projects consume more than 20 percent of your total engineering effort.

The second tip is to avoid one-off requests. Never solve a problem in a way that is specific to only one customer. Always make sure the solution you build solves the problem in a way that other customers will be able to use as well. That way, you only have to build the function one time.

Next, keep your projects small, focused and attainable. Even six- month projects can be broken down in to smaller, 2 week increments. It is always easier to hit short deadlines with small tasks. The team will be less likely to miss their small deadlines and that keeps the major targets in check.

Finally, beware of struggling managers who commonly see a short term fix of buying another solution to integrate with yours as a way to accelerate progress. In some cases, acquisition projects are perceived as easy, but some are quite difficult. The reality is that an acquisition is still just another project and will not solve the underlying problem of thrashing or help get the company back on track.

Once an organization enters a state of thrashing, it usually requires some radical changes in thinking to break the cycle. It is far easier to avoid this condition all together with a little preventative medicine. Have faith in your long term plans. Make them flexible enough to accommodate the needs of new customers. In doing so, my experience shows you can potentially achieve twice as much, and your company will rid itself of this expensive killer of companies once and for all.


Thrashing: The Productivity and Company Killer - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Piper's Website.

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