This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Memos are like meetings --
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy. - Charles Peters
...kind of like the flurry of emails I sent out yesterday, justifying the past few days of work, I must admit.
"...the point of technology is not to give people more access to an individual, but to give that individual more control over their time. You use your cell phone, remote internet access and/or BlackBerry to manage your job on your own terms. Your focus is on outcomes, not availability."
It's not about how much you do - it's about how much you accomplish.
"Corporate leaders who think they can slash expenses without customers noticing might want to give Circuit City Stores Inc.'s top brass a call. The electronics retailer is living the nightmare of cost-cutting gone bad."
Silos: Not Always a Problem -- Jack points out that sometimes silos are merely an artifact of how the work gets done, identifying two flavors...
"The key between these types of silos is that one is imposed by rigid structures and politics, and the other is imposed by demands of personal work styles and needs."
Read When silos work. I like pieces like this, that apply common sense to cliches - that help to avoid knee-jerk reactions due to labels. It's too easy to fall into jargon habits.
The Most Important Trait? -- According to a survey at CIO Blogs...
What's wrong with this picture?
That item leading the survey with 38% of respondents - the ability to juggle multiple priorities - is pathetic. It's management's responsibility to determine the priorities, either by edict or, preferably, by some systematic process, and to provide processes to minimize re-prioritization as much as possible. If left up the the folks doing the work, either juggling and multi-tasking will occur, resulting in dropped balls and unnecessarily extended delivery dates, or those folks doing the work with choose a priority, which may not coincide with the priority best for the firm.
I've got to believe that this survey was put together with tongue firmly in cheek. I want to believe that this survey was put together with tongue firmly in cheek. Please tell me they (including those who responded) were kidding. Please.
Flow On - Over at gapingvoid, Hugh brings together the questions of relevancy and flow, and suggests that Sig might have a point suggesting that "flow" is "next."
Hate to break it to them, but those of us who have been familiar and worked with Goldratt's Theory of Constraints have long emphasized the understanding and management of "flow" as a means to assuring relevancy of activity. Whether in manufacturing, distribution, or projects and multi-project systems (like R&D product development or engineering shops), the goal of the owning parent system is the prime determinant of relevancy of activity.
And for these systems, from those as large as the whole corporation to those as small as a project team or production cell, the means to achieving the goal are a set of interdependent activities linked by handoffs physical, informational, or transactional. The "flow" of these handoffs (think a project task network, or a process flow chart) should be limited only by the capacity of strategically selected constraint functions, which then allow a simplified focus of management on assuring the flow of work to, through, and from these constraints.
Unfortunately, too many organizations ignore or are ignorant of the importance of constraint management, and allow too many irrelevancies -- too many erroneous assumptions -- too many misleading measurements -- to distract from the focus on flow. Too many organizations focus too much on managing capacity and cost of irrelevant parts of the system instead of focusing on managing the flow for the real source of more goal stuff -- system throughput. (If you can grow the top line - the bottom line (the goal for for-profit entities) is much more assured than if you obsess too much on the lines in between. You can only cut costs so much before hurting throughput. Throughput is potentially unbounded.)
Once the idea of flow through the system as the source of organizational goal attainment and relevancy is understood, it's a lot easier to move on to personal flow and relevancy.
View Frank Patrick's profile
