Aimed at the "manager of a small workgroup faced with a wide range of responsibilities." Hey, that describes my job! So does the book have useful words of advice? Indeed it does...[amazon.co.uk]
[amazon.com]
I ignored much of the "what is a manager" type discussion in the book and focused in on the practical meat that I could use:
- Build routine checks into your calendar
- Organise starting at the incoming items first, not the backlog
- Use your calendar to organise all of your activities, not just your appointments
- Transfer items from to do list, to the calendar
- Do nightly reviews
- Plan to achieve certain tasks in the day
- Set an example - manage your time, and use the same systems you expect your staff to use
All of the above seem fairly standard pieces of advice, and useful reminders - but we get them early in Chapter 1, so it looks like the book may provide useful information throughout.
Chapter 2 has the theme of "Managing for Reliability": finish every item in a reasonable time and meet your commitments. Treat your commitments as your high priority items by prioritising before you commit.
The discussion of 'forms' in Chapter 3 makes the point that people hate formalities. And uses a discussion of control theory to emphasis the notion of feedback. Without information you can't manage. You can use formalisation to get information. And knowing that people rebel against formalism means you have to use creative ways of getting that information, and dump the forms when you no longer need the information, and change them as the system changes.
Chapter 4 held my first proper 'take away value points', in discussing the different types of work that gets done. Where 'task' represents a unit of work that a single person can do without interruption (optimistic) therefore less than a day in length. Also Tasks have 'stopping points' which sometimes lead to 'handover' to someone else.
- One-off tasks - not part of a thread
- Project driven - defined end product and target end date.
- Routine - ongoing work that may have no project or thread. Identify the routine tasks that you have to understand how much 'time' you have available.
- Cyclic work - seasonal (need to plan for this)
- Background work - that you do when you have time. Useful to identify some work tasks as background work so you have a bucket of them when you need them.
"What's on your plate" encourages you to work out what you do by constructing an inventory of your tasks (routine and otherwise). Identify your commitments, and the end points (deliverables, due date) of those commitments. Also track interruptions and ad-hoc work.
As a result of reading this chapter I have amended my time tracking to have a separate project heading for 'Routine Management' as opposed to 'Ad-hoc Management'.
So now that you can track your time and count your availability against used and committed time, if you can't make your commitments then do something about it: start letting people know, start delegating, learn more efficiency, pursue satisficing instead of perfection, but do something now.
The book then goes on to discuss team to do lists, managing time etc. etc.
The Google preview site gives a pretty thorough overview so I don't want to go overboard on the detail.
I found this a useful read and took some valuable points away, so on that basis I recommend a read.
Related Links:- amazon.co.uk
- amazon.com
- Google Books Page
- Irene Tobis web site
- Michael Tobis web site
- Irene Tobis consultancy Ducks-in-a-row
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