Especially for SME – 66: Select when only and Management.

16 November 2022

SME 3: Can you give some examples of choosing when only in the field of Management? Mr. Lowe: In management, timing is the critical dimension for effectiveness. We should be clear about sequence of the tasks constituting a process or role, priority, and duration of the tasks to be able to effectively manage any process or role. We should also be able to pro-actively imagine what factors can affect the time of completion and the quality of the task, and the vital few and trivial many of the factors that affect the quantity and quality of what is produced. We must think proactively what all could go wrong with these vital few factors and ensure proactively nothing goes wrong with these vital few factors during execution so that both timeliness and quality are largely taken care of. Letting these factors slip and ending up spending more time and resulting in defective quality will be the result if we do not ensure these do not happen proactively. And if we let quality suffer, the timeliness also suffers because you spend more time in rectification or repair of the defect. When the sequence of the tasks in a process or role is right you save a lot of time and ensure quality. When the sequence is not well thought out and not right, you lose both timeliness and quality. So, we have to spend time in thinking about the sequence of all tasks to perform a role or a process and rearranging them so that time is saved and quality is ensured. This must be done proactively before execution starts and keep updated as we gain experience in repeating the process. We also must think about competing processes, roles, and tasks within them. We have to assign priorities using principles that we already discussed. Go back and take another look at these very practical and powerful hints if you so desire. Particularly we should give top priority to tasks that would resolve the bottleneck of the Super systems for the role we are performing, as bottlenecks represent the biggest gaps currently that our SS has, and if we do not fill those gaps (unfulfilled expectations of the external customers), someone else- our competition- will and get the enormous benefits that goes with resolution of bottlenecks. When a bottleneck is spotted, that is the highest priority to attend to ahead of any other task at that point in time. That is, you must attend to it immediately. The very thought of “I will do it later” may be ok for other tasks or factors but not for the bottleneck and must be banished at the time you have identified a bottleneck. When you are resolving the bottleneck, you have no time for anything else except resolving the bottleneck. The other problem that comes in doing these things proactively is the need to think ahead i.e., peep into the future possibilities. Peeping into the future is an area that is prohibited or constrained severely for human beings. And yet we have to, if we are to be preventive or proactive. This ability comes out of may be education, but certainly out of practice for several times, and thinking each time we practiced as to what went wrong, locating the root cause for the fault or the mistake and eliminating the root cause; every time we practice, we keep on perfecting the method by repeated practice by locating and eliminating the root cause every time a problem has occurred. This applies to peeping into future as well. Management (in official or personal lives) is all about managing one’s resources with respect to that all powerful and always ticking resource namely time. So, what makes sense is to include in our thinking, time and a proactive approach to manage effectively. Take for example the recovery of outstanding from your debtors. The most ineffective way of doing this is to pursue any amount that is outstanding in no particular sequence. The next better way of doing this is to arrange the amounts outstanding in descending order, by doing an ABC analysis on the amounts outstanding by bill or by customer and attack one by one top down. But the most effective way of doing this is when you introduce the time as part of your method to attack outstanding amounts. The parameter that decided the effectiveness of collection process is not just the amount but amount x time for which the amount is outstanding. A Rs. 1000 pending for 3 months is less critical for collection than a Rs. 200 pending for more than 2 years. The additional risk of leaving outstanding for a long time is that they have a way of becoming bad debt more easily with passing time. If we do an ABC analysis based not just on amounts alone but on amount x time for which they are outstanding and concentrate our efforts on collecting on the top 5% of the outstanding, you will find that you would have recovered 90% of total Re-month outstanding. SME 3: Very interesting, we should adopt this: can we cover some more aspects in selecting when only in management? ……………..Contd.