Problem-Solving Success Tip: Use Your Time for Problems that are Truly ImportantLearn Management Articles on management-info.biz. Problem-Solving Success Tip: Use Your Time for Problems that are Truly Important article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Hard as it may be to walk away once you're aware of it, just because a problem is there doesn't mean you have to solve it. Ask yourself and your colleagues, 'What will happen if we don't solve this problem?' If the answer is, 'not much,' then turn your attention to something more important. If you don't know what will happen, find out before you undertake a problem-solving project. It should be clear to you and everyone else involved that the problem is worth the effort--and expense--to fix it. Quantify the cost of the problem quickly, but as realistically as you can. Include lost opportunity costs as well as real expenses such as staff time to deal with the problem, travel expenses, etc. Use actual costs where you can; estimate where you can't. Then guesstimate what it will cost to analyze and fix it. Write your analysis down, stating all your assumptions explicitly. Get a colleague to verify that your assumptions and estimates are reasonable. Start with a rough 'order of magnitude' estimate. That may be enough to answer the question of whether you should proceed. If it's not clear, especially if the cost to solve it will be high, do a more careful analysis. If it will cost more to fix than to live with the problem, or if the number is even close, perhaps your resources (time, people, money) are better spent on other projects. If you decide to proceed anyway, you can do so with a better understanding of what you're undertaking. On the other hand, if you can demonstrate that the cost of the problem is much higher than the cost of solving it, using estimates based on reasonable assumptions, it will generally be much easier to get the resources you need. You can use your written analysis as a sales tool to help win support for your decision to proceed or not. We have to learn to distinguish those things that are truly important from those that are merely urgent. --Jerry D. Campbell
copyright 2005. Jeanne Sawyer. All Rights Reserved. |
More Articles:1. Online Business Peace of Mind By Phil Jones Is your online business disaster-proof? Online businesses face a unique set of challenges. Unlike our offline counterparts, we must worry about hackers, credit-card fraud, loss of data, virus attacks, websites going down and more.The good news? You can fix most of these problems in under ten minutes each!The freedom of owning your own business comes with a price. That price often means taking care of the 'little things' that were provided us in our 'employee' days.One challenge we face is bein… 2. Balancing Technology, Management, and Leadership 'The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.' -- Alfred North Whitehead, 19th century British mathematician and philosopher As Achieve (my first consulting company) was working with our Clients to implement Toward Excellence (the cultural change process we had developed in conjunction with Tom Peters) I was growing increasingly uneasy. Something didn't feel right. In In Search of Excellence, Peters and Waterman presented a powerful case against 'the ra… 3. Leadership W/O Communication is Like a Gun Without a Bullet-- Imppressive but It Can't Do Anything By Rick Johnson Next to people, communication is the most critical element to success whether you are in a growth mode or you are facing difficult economic times. However, when times are tough, failure to communicate has much greater consequences. Failure to communicate could accelerate failure . Communication is essential to developing trust. Trust is necessary to get people to reach down deep inside and give everything they have under the most difficult circumstances.Colin Powell stated in an interview that… 4. Turn Your Speech Into A Leadership Talk By Brent Filson My experience working with thousands of leaders world wide for the past two decades teaches me that most leaders are screwing up their careers.On a daily basis, these leaders are getting the wrong results or the right results in the wrong ways.Interestingly, they themselves are choosing to fail. They're actively sabotaging their own careers.Leaders commit this sabotage for a simple reason: They make the fatal mistake of choosing to communicate with presentations and speeches -- not leadership… |
||||
