What's Wrong with European IT?

"Complacency 'rife' in IT projects" the BBC reports, "Many European IT workers are not being held responsible for delivering projects late, a new study suggests."

It found that 51% of European IT professionals said there would be no risk to their job, compared 33% in Asia and 22% in the Americas.
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The three most common causes for delay were outsourcing, changing priorities half way through a project and poor co-ordination between managers.

David Quantrell, Vice President of HP Software EMEA said the responses about the effect on careers of late projects showed that IT departments are not being held responsible.

"This shows the lack of accountability of IT departments in delivering business results," he said.

The outcomes of IT projects have been slipping, with 57% of respondents saying that fewer than half of the IT initiatives in their firms had a positive outcome.

That is up from a figure of 54% in the same survey in 2006.

Why is this? Is there a relationship between your attitude towards work and vacation and your performance in IT? I think the answer is clearly "yes."

If you're just punching a clock, working for the weekend and staying at work simply to earn more vacation time, then your heart is not in your work. If you are being matrixed in several different directions, even if you love your work, your heart is not in your work. IT is not like Tiddlywinks -- we play in a complex arena where you need to be on your game at all times. In IT, especially, if your job is so stupid a computer can do it, a computer WILL do it and you're living on borrowed time. So we're always moving to more abstract and complex work.

I admire Europe for a lot of reasons, and I love visiting there. They've done a lot to make IT improve, including releasing a new version of ITIL this week. I imagine from their standpoint we Americans look like a bunch of workaholics.

In fact, it's becoming a popular notion to view too much work as a sign of some kind of disease. A recent Delaware Online article put it like "Can't stop working? Is workaholism is habit or a disease?"

About 60 percent of higher-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, according to a study published in December in the Harvard Business Review. But they don't feel exploited; in fact, the study found 66 percent love their job. And not all these people are Wall Street executives. The trend is evident among doctors, lawyers, sales people, teachers and small business owners.

"There is immense tension ... because, on the one hand, these jobs have a lot of negative spillover effects on health, relationships and children; on the other hand, a lot of these people with these jobs love their work to death," said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, in New York, and co-author of the jobs study.

"I don't think I have ever worked a 40-hour week in my life. I have always worked 60 or 70 hours," said Jayne Armstrong, district director of the Small Business Administration in Delaware. "I pride myself that I work small-business hours, because it connects the SBA to the small businesses that we serve."

Still, Hewlett and other experts on so-called "workaholics" see consequences in the long days. According to Hewlett's study, 46 percent of these workaholics say their job interferes with having a strong relationship with their partner. Sixty-five percent of the men in the study and 33 percent of the women say it interferes with their relationship with their children.
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A need to rein in the compulsion to work has led to the establishment of Workaholics Anonymous chapters in about 20 states since 1983. Founded by a teacher and a banker in New York, the nonprofit organization has a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous.

I don't know, guys. I guess I am a workaholic, then. But it sure seems to me that when you love your work, enjoy doing it and enjoy making yourself better at it, that of course you are going to have to make trade-offs. We all don't get to the spend the time we would like with our children. That doesn't mean our priorities are out of whack -- that just means that life is all about making choices. Some of those choices have bad consequences. Do you want to go to a doctor who lives, breathes, and swims in his work? Or one who is just going through the motions and thinking about his afternoon golf game?

I think we over-generalize when we say that people that work all the time are workaholics. As for me, when I was in my 30s I stopped thinking about my time as either being "working" or "not-working" . Those names simply do not make any sense. It's like when you went to school and thought your time was either "learning" or "not learning". Once you grow the heck up, you realize you should be learning all the time. There should never be a time when you are not learning -- what, are you planning on becoming a squash? The same goes for working -- you should have some point in life, some purpose. Sure, your 8-hour-day might not relate directly to that purpose, but if that's the case, then you should be spending your free time making sure you get that fixed -- going to night school, getting certified, whatever.

Your work, your life's mission, is something you should always be doing. A vacation is simply an awareness that in order to do your mission better, you need to step away from it every now and then. That actually can lead to MORE vacations, not less. It can lead to more time with your family. But it requires a self awareness of how to keep yourself effective.

I love Europe, but when half of your IT employees feel like performance is not related to keeping their job, you got problems. Big problems. Big cultural problems. If the world were full of workaholics it would be a much better place. If it were full of people without goals and consequences for their actions it would be much worse. In IT especially, we need smart workaholics, not working autonomatrons.