Manual Coordination - Can you afford it any longer? |
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By: Dr Neil Miller Posted: 2009-03-17 08:10:55 |
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Managers spend a lot of their time doing simple coordination of people and work. Most of this coordination is manual in that it has to be done by a manager or their delegate.Coordination is required so people can work together productively. In most cases, the person doing the coordination is not actually doing the work - they are simply making sure that the work flows, the work is done, and relevant stakeholders are kept informed.Coordination is usually done during a meeting of some kind, over the phone, in a letter or memo, using emails, instant messaging, or other communication means. Each of these communication channels needs to be initiated and the receiver needs to be available.Unfortunately as people get more and more busy, their availability to communicate becomes less and less. When someone is unavailable, this leads to more communications and unproductive breaks in workflow. Sometimes when people's availability fails to coincide, a simple communication can take hours to complete.The most frustrating thing about manual coordination is that the actual coordination work is usually very easy. Typical actions or ToDo's are:
1. Working with people to decide who will do what, when, and with whom. 2. Bringing actions back on track 3. Creating a simple list of actions 4. Keeping track of the actions (who has done what, when and with who) 5. Identifying work that is not happening in accordance with the agreed plan 6. Keeping relevant stakeholders informed 7. Reporting on the work has been done It is interesting that only actions 1 and 2 require a manager to make decisions. All the other actions are processes that can be largely done with minimal intervention from managers. Yet these actions usually take significantly more time than 1 and 2. TASKey has found that automating process actions using web software, that is connected between stakeholders, significantly reduces the time and effort required to coordinate the work. By using web software to manage most coordination actions, within and between tasks and stakeholders, unproductive time and effort spent on coordination is minimised. In addition, an audit trail of key coordination processes is a by-product. Even more time and effort can be saved by using the workflow of past activities as a template to plan similar activities in the future.Every situation is different, so it is difficult to measure time savings achieved by automating manual coordination processes. However it can easily be argued that time savings in the order of 30 - 50% can be achieved relatively easily. Now TASKey has a web software solution to automate the coordination of work. So it is fair question to ask, can managers afford to continue to waste in the order of 30-50% of their time doing unproductive manual coordination? To automate the coordination of work across an enterprise visit www.taskey.com and to automate the coordination of work in small teams visit www.me2team.comBy, Neil Miller |
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