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. How to Protect Your Boss From Bad Meetings By Steve Kaye Tough times mean more meetings. This happens because executives respond to problems by calling meetings to fix them. And when the meetings fail to produce results, they call more meetings. In some companies, people have even called meetings to figure out why their meetings didn’t work.Rather than watch your boss trudge off to an endless schedule of meetings, here are things you can do to help make the most of them.1) When someone calls to schedule a meeting for your boss, ask for the agenda.… 2. Developing Your Mission 'The best Leader is one who knows how to pick good people to do what he or she wants done and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.' - Heidi Richards - Developing Your Mission Mission statements describe the purpose of an organization or a sub-group of it. It is a general description of what it is that the team is there to do. It grows out of the Vision. It describes the organization's purpose. It tends to be general with objectives often accompanying it. The mi… 3. Get Out Of The Stone Age: Give Leadership Talks By Brent Filson 160 years ago, the newly invented electric telegraph carried the first news message. The message zipped 40 miles in a flash over wires from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.The public was dazzled -- except Henry David Thoreau. He wrote: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."Today, we live in a Golden Age of communication. We have the Internet. We have faxes. We have e-mails. We have… 4. Cheat Sheet; Understanding The MSDS and Your Obligations In The Workplace To Employees By Lance Winslow MSDS SHEETSMSDS stands for Material Safety Data Sheets. MSDS sheets contain nine sections. These sections are:I. General InformationII. IngredientsIII. Physical DataIV. Fire and Explosion Hazard DataV. Health Hazard InformationVI. Reactivity DataVII. Spill, Leak and Disposal Procedures VIII. Special Handling InformationIX. User’s ResponsibilityAt the top of each sheet is a square on end. It looks like a diamond shape. It is broken into four squares inside this diamond shape. The … |
||||
