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. ISO 9001 Registration – 8 Steps for Success By Chris Anderson You’ve made the plans, built the quality system and conducted the audit. So how do you register your company as ISO 9001 conformant? And how can you be sure you’re getting the most value for your investment? Here’s how the process works.Certifying Your Company and Quality SystemAfter your company's ISO 9001 audit, you will want to register your company's quality system to show that you've met the requirements. And to do this effectively, you will need to follow eight essential steps.1. Finding… 2. Employee Success! - 7 Ways Feedback Works By Martin Haworth By sharing how well you are doing and how well your expectations are met, your people get to understand better. So, frequent, realistic, objective feedback is not seen as criticism, more a way of each in your team helping each other get better, building on the success you already have.So, why does Feedback work? It's HonestBeing open and honest with each other builds your team - everyone sharing themselves takes some time, but when it happens, there is synergy which elevates performance.… 3. Countering the False Notion that Six Sigma is Elitist By Peter Peterka Too often, when people think of Six Sigma and black belts they see them as having an elitist connotation. The opinion that Six Sigma is elitist or that black belts are elitist, however, are false. In its purest form Six Sigma is a “way of life” for an organization serious about process improvement. It just happens to have certain characteristics that people like to throw stones at. That some people have come to believe this false notion is because they have misinterpreted the nature of Six Sig… 4. Professional Personal Development - What is it? We think the term 'training' is too restrictive, and we only use it because that is the context within which many organisations can understand what we do. But whether you call it people skills training, interpersonal skills training, soft skills training or professional personal development, what we're talking about is people changing what they do in order to be more effective, more able and quite simply, happier at their job and in their personal lives. What we do know is that people take on ne… |
||||
