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The hidden productivity killer: How can you realize growth despite a shortage of personnel?
Do you know what one of your biggest productivity inhibitors is? Bad software. Bad software stagnates economic growth. Not all companies are aware of that but it's easy to prove. And to solve.
Because your employees cannot keep going, has to wait for software needlessly, valuable time is lost. In 2012 ¼ of a workday was lost per week waiting for applications, in 2023 that increased to between ½ and a full day per week. Per employee, just to be clear. And the more processes you make digital the worse it gets. An that was not what you intended when you' digitalizing your company.
So you can make the same group of employees up to 25% more productive. Without paying a penny more in wages. Or (quite a few) pennies in recruitment cost. And without turning up the heat on your employees to work harder.
Why software quality has been decaying for ages
The software you use is too slow, too expensive and too complicated. That's quite a strong statement but ... unfortunately it's true. There's good news too: it can be improved. Quite a lot.
Somewhere in the 90's the IT industry started to consider programming cost and time to market more important than quality. Back then that was sort of a logical decision; hardware became ever cheaper and the demand for IT personnel increased rapidly which led to a salary boom.
The strond demand for IT personnel also meant getting an IT job was much easier - even without an IT education. In other words, with far fewer qualifications. Retraining programs became very common. Sometimes retraining delivered good - and more often than occasionally excellent - programmers, but the bulk of the outflow was mediocre. Many people got a retraining because there dream job had no open positions and IT had plenty of openings.
Today, 30 years later, we've gone completely overboard. Software production cost is leading instead of quality. Up to a point it's sensible to keep costs in check. But when balconies fall off of an apartment building because the balconies could be made cheaper we find that unacceptable. So why do we we accept the same thing in IT without question? Yeah, but Hugo, a balcony can lead to a life threatening situation. You're absolutely right. In IT it's - fortunately - not always life threatening. But sometimes lives are lost due to bad software, just think of the Boeing 737 Max - software designed to prevent a disaster caused one instead.
24.000.000 times as fast
Let's revisit application speed, or rather lack thereof. With application speed we're not talking about a few percent or a few dozen percent. An example: a customer of ours had a query in their data warehouse that claimed a large portion of the morning processing. It ran for hours and the users had to wait for it. That query has been accelerated by a factor of 24.000.000 and now runs in less than a second. Loading the data warehouse now finishes hours earlier. Our customer thought hist data warehouse was as optimal as possible, that's what they told him ...
Another example: a rental system that was procured as a SAAS solution. A bad configuration in CloudFlare caused not just the changed page components, but all page components to be transmitted every time. For the technical people, there was no caching at all. Fixing the bad configuration decimated the traffic between the SAAS environment and the employee's browsers. Tens of seconds became a few seconds. For every single page. That saves an hour per employee per day. Assuming 260 workday per year, that saves this company 260 hours per employee per year, which amounts to 30 working days. Yes, that right: 6 working weeks which is 30 working days.
Money is pouring out the windows – what's your situation?
People get used to waiting. Lot's of people are in the same traffic jam every morning. It keeps getting just a little bit longer. In the same way your employees get used to an application that keeps getting a little bit slower. And because they've grown accustomed to working with slow software over the years everybody thinks that this is sort of the way it just is. And that probably results in your employees not reporting slowness - at least not anymore. So you don't know there's a problem. Or what the cause is. An that it can be fixed. And how to fix it. With just about every customer that we serve frustration is a given, and the surprise when we fix it is enormous. Do we just about alway fix it? No, we ALWAYS fix it.
The IT department is not responsible
Your IT department is responsible for well-functioning and safe infrastructure. For fast networks and fast servers. But not for fast applications. That's the responsibility of the software developer. Over 90% of the bottlenecks we find in applications are caused by poorly written applications. The cause rarely lies in the IT infrastructure. Even if we find it in the IT infrastructure it's mostly caused by how the application uses the infrastructure. That doesn't mean bad software can't be fixed by a better infrastructure. Especially when you apply temporary improvements that keep things running while the real issue is tackled. Fixing this kind of 'hassle' will make more people happy than you might think.
So, just add more hardware?
The standard solution when an application has become so slow that there's no denying it, is adding hardware. Or more cloud resources if you've alread migrated. Aside from the cos - especially in the cloud - more hardware will rarely fix the issue. Or only for a short time. a lot of the problems are in the scalability of the software. Software that runs fine with 10 or even 100 users will fall over - 100% guaranteed - with 200 or 500 users. Because the software's architecture can't handle the scale.
Most software builders build for functionality, not for speed and certainly not for scalability. They give insufficient thought to what's needed to make the software work properly with 100 concurrent users. And certainly not with 500 or 1000. And they don't have the possibility to test on that scale. So they build and test for a much smaller scale. Their software might work at your scale, but wastes a lot of work time of your employees because the optimization for your scale is missing.
How do I know if I have a problem?
The change that you do have a problem is much larger than that you don't have one. Experience taught me that. The only way to objectively know how much time your employees waste on costly waiting for applications is performing a measurement. That can be done lightning fast. You won't only find out where you have a problem, but also how big it is en where to look for the solution. In other words, you'll know how to make your employees more productive without extra payroll cost. And make them happier.
Make an appointment with me - no strings attached - and in 15 minutes you'll have the solution.