Michael White, founder of MashTank, is on a mission to provide leaders with the data and tools they need to effectively map, measure, and optimize success in their businesses. He believes that understanding and separating the two types of work – transactions and projects – is essential for long-term business success.
Transactions are tasks that are recurring, have known outcomes, easy-to-measure units, and predefined steps. Projects, on the other hand, are tasks that are done once or infrequently, have goals but no known outcomes, and are harder to measure. Identifying and separating these two types of work is crucial for ensuring efficiency and productivity within an organization.
White highlights the pitfalls of switching between work types using a simplified example of a grocery store employee and their manager. Switching between tasks incurs switching costs and can lead to lower performance and morale for employees, as well as difficulty for managers and senior-level leaders in measuring and managing work across teams and departments.
By separating work types for every person in the organization, White believes that productivity can be boosted, on-time delivery can improve, financial metrics can be enhanced, and comparisons of performance between individuals and teams can be easier. This approach can lead to higher employee satisfaction, clearer goals, and improved retention rates.
For smaller businesses that may need to mix work types, White suggests dedicating separate blocks of time for each type of work. By managing and measuring transactional work and projects separately, using tools such as BI dashboards and progress trackers, businesses can still see improvements in productivity, performance, efficiency, and ease.
Ultimately, the purpose of identifying and separating work types is to provide clarity for team members, increase productivity and performance, and save managers and directors from the costs of foggy vision, turnover, switching costs, and lost revenue. This approach allows leaders to focus on load balancing, stakeholder reporting, driving ownership, and increasing transparency, while also opening up new opportunities for AI and automation, friendly competition, accurate projections, and cooperation among team members.
