Tip: focus on your overall goal
Friday, September 21st, 2007Having just been on holiday, I’ve had the chance to read something completely different. I chose a book from the background reading list given to my daughter, who is just about to start university: The Goal, a book about management thinking.
Specifically it is about the management of a manufacturing plant, which comes down to locating and exploiting bottlenecks in the system.
Perhaps a rather strange choice for a holiday read, but it is a written as a novel and rather enjoyable.
The improved analysis all became possible because the plant manager began to look at what was important for overall success. Throughput (sales), inventory (invested items that will be sold) and operating expense all needed to be balanced well for a successful plant. (Previously efficiency measurements had been taken on specific areas and as plant changes developed, the measurements hadn’t. Delivery times were always late, and expediters were always busy juggling tasks to rush orders through. Sounds similar to juggling personal workload when deadlines loom! )
As a result, the plant began to deliver on time and was able to take more orders due to more precise controls with less pressure, because plans weren’t being changed regularly. Wouldn’t it be nice to always to deliver on time with no pressure?
Relating this to personal workload style, I’m sure that how we balance long projects (more inventory?) and short projects (quicker throughput?), and whether we invest in developing ourselves or others we can ultimately delegate to (adding to operating expense?) needs to be tuned to our overall goal.
How do you decide your relative time spent on each of your activity types?
