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Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm
Improving the Team
AW4

Crunch Time: The Death of Creativity Prior Year Content

Extrinsic motivators like crunch time worked a hundred years ago in the era of low-tech factories. In the knowledge economy today, the high pressure of crunch time efforts often backfires. So why do many agile software shops still default to crunch time—probably to their detriment? Ryan Tang says that traditional management motivators—crunch time, cash rewards, and even employee recognition—have their place in today’s workplace; they work for straightforward tasks. But creative work, on the other hand, is impeded by the same external pressure. People performing mundane tasks work faster with these motivators, but workers who need to find a creative solution actually take longer under crunch time pressure. Using three case studies, Ryan explores the effect of crunch time, analyzing the positive and negative effects of management pressure. He provides guidance to agile software managers and leaders on the effective use of crunch time and offers alternative motivators that foster, rather than stifle, creativity.

1.00 PMI® PDU
Ryan Tang
Ryan Tang, Pivotal

Ryan Tang is an engineering manager on the Cloud Foundry team at Pivotal, where he is very interested in practices that foster a happy and productive workplace for talented technologists. Throughout his career—including time at VMware, Deloitte Consulting, and two biotech start-ups—Ryan has worked in a variety of software development environments ranging from large-scale waterfall to extreme programming. By day, he develops software and runs DevOps for distributed cloud systems. In his personal professional growth time, Ryan seeks to understand why agile works and why it seems to encourage a better culture for talented technologists.

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