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This is one article from the issue of August, 2002.
For other stories and articles, go to the Current Issue.
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Management |
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Events and Processes
How To Put The Focus On Results
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Are the leaders of your project, business, or corporation paying more attention to events or to processes? Experience proves that teams focused on processes are more productive, because they know where they're going every step of the way.
If you participate in a meeting that attends primarily the crisis du jour, it's probably an event. If, on the other hand, you can perceive how the meeting contributes to the specific goals and objectives of your project, business or corporation, you're probably dealing with one step in a process that's headed in the right direction.
Here's a tip-off: How are the unresolved issues in one meeting carried forward to some subsequent meeting? In an event-driven team, deferred items keep coming up and seldom reach resolution. The subject never really gets resolved, because there's no process for getting it resolved.
Success Strategies
| Focus — make sure things that get done contribute to the intended results,
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| Attention — make sure the focus is on processes, and events are managed as parts of that larger whole, and
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| Link — make sure the results of one event feeds into the next.
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Focus
Management is a balancing act, alternating between the details and the overall objective, between tactics and strategy. It's easy to get trapped in the tactical details, because these need to get done to achieve the strategic objective.
Yes, you need to pay attention to the part of this week's work that may be slipping behind schedule. On the other hand, paying attention to whether this slipping schedule is even important to the overall result is sometimes overlooked.
That's why project planning tools are important: Tools like Microsoft Project (there are dozens of alternatives) help teams decide whether today's particular crisis is important. If the deliverable was due on Wednesday, but the schedule has another two weeks of "slack," it may be enough just to remind someone they're overdue.
Attention
If people groan when yet another event is scheduled, you can bet they're already aware that these events aren't contributing to goals...or they don't understand what the relationship is supposed to be. Each event has to be managed in light of the overall process for delivering results.
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Hold a meeting (or other event) because it moves the process (or project) forward. It may serve as a way to detect problems before they become crises, it may serve to bond the team more tightly together. So long as it contributes, and that contribution is clear to all the participants, it's a worthy event.
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a meeting just because "it's time to have a meeting" is
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Link
An isolated event that doesn't produce long-term results is wasted. When the event (e.g., a meeting) takes place, it needs to be informed by the events that have gone before, and it must produce results that will shape future events yet to be scheduled. As importantly, there are resources assigned (people, time, money) so progress can be made between major events.
Managing unresolved issue represents a good example: During a meeting, when some decision can't yet be made, it might be discarded with a brusque, "We'll deal with that later." That's an unproductive treatment of the event. Never, ever defer an item from one meeting to the next meeting "for discussion then." That's a sure way to waste everybody's time.
What's better is when the meeting leader ensures that the topic is placed on the draft agenda for some future event (see "Building Team Spirit Online" (Part 2), in this issue, page 4). Then, to ensure something actually gets done, someone is assigned the responsibility to get reportable results or more information by that time. That professional's responsibility is to do whatever's necessary to resolve as much of the outstanding issue as possible. In a perfect world, the next meeting's agenda will only need to include a final report on how the issue was resolved.
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