Avoiding the 4 biggest management blunders: Never miss a deadline again.
How many times have you shown up to a status meeting with your boss to discuss your team’s progress on a project only to report “we’re behind, because Bill didn’t know he was supposed to do X, and Dave didn’t know he was supposed to do Y?” Simple disorganization is one of the most embarrassing management blunders. Even managers who are highly effective are often embarrassed when they cut corners on “minor” organizational details which mushroom into needless, preventable production delays.
Managers don’t skip over “minor,” dangerous organizational details because they are incompetent; they skip over them because they have a lot on their plate and they need to get through it as quickly as they can. Unfortunately those details can explode into project delays which hinder your productivity and embarrass you among your co-workers.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be hard to stay on top of your work and your team if you follow these steps:
1. Tasking
Break routine work or projects down into tasks that must be completed. Then break these tasks down into smaller tasks until no task will take more than a day or two to complete.
One of the biggest reasons why projects are often delivered late is because managers don’t organize the work of their teams into distinct tasks, and if they do manage to break up work into tasks they break them into ones that are too large to accurately schedule. It is much easier to estimate the duration of a small task than a big one. A task like “Update the web site” is too broad to estimate accurately. Breaking it up into smaller tasks will lead to a much more accurate estimate.
2. Prioritize
Determine which tasks must be complete before others can be started.
If you don’t account for dependencies between tasks, tasks which depend on the results of previously completed tasks, then it’s impossible to accurately assess how long it will take to complete a project or routine work. Failing to account for dependencies is a classic, yet easily avoidable management blunder.
3. Schedule
Schedule target delivery dates for each task and put them into writing.
Managers often operate with only one deadline in mind: the date of final project completion. This inevitably leads to a lot of time wasted during the earliest phases of the project, when that deadline seems so far away, and a lot of stressful, long nights at the office once the deadline creeps up. You can avoid this pitfall by scheduling each individual task and handing the delivery dates in writing to your team.
4. Assign Responsibility
Let your team know who is responsible for each task.
One thing that managers often fail to do is to put their assignments in writing. Everybody on your team might have a clear idea of what they are supposed to do the moment they leave the planning meeting, but that clarity has a very, very short half-life and leads to miscommunication, missed deadlines, and embarrassment for the supervising manager.
Does this sound complicated or unrealistic? Do you say “while in an ideal world it would be great to do these things, I simply don’t have the time!”
SmartDraw schedule features can facilitate all the above
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