Saturday, November 26, 2011

Management mistake #1

As a manager, you have little time to deal with the little details. You want to have all the information to effectively fix problems and nothing more, because if you're in a company employs 100 or more people, you simply haven no time to deal with the little stuff.

So we delegate and get flows of information back on how things are going. In general, things in the mind of a manager seem to have two possible categories:
- Working as it should. Don't fix it.
- Not working as it should. Do something about it.

There just isn't enough time to focus on everything. So a manager needs to be good at quickly determining where to apply himself and where not.
But there is a critical error that can be made here. Sometimes, working as should is not what you want.

A good manager, in my opinion, should be aware that there is a third category:
- Working for now. Need a better solution soon.
And this happens a LOT in IT business. The distance between the manager and the solutions implemented is so large that the manager never get to actually see the actual cost of the solution that is implemented. And then, the 'pain' of each incomplete implementation is carried by the IT department. They'll spend more and more time paying for those quick fixes than a good fix would have cost them.

So management solution #1 is :
Make sure that things that are fixed ( The problem has gone away) are really fixed and not just a quick fix. Your time is too valuable to keep adressing different quick fixes for the same old problem

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