There Are Many Paths To The Same Destination
Life happens when you’re busy making other plans. Because of this, challenges will at some point prevent goals or objectives from being completed in time. Effective management involves staying informed of the current state of the work being done and having potential courses of action in mind before they’re necessary. Here are several things to consider to keep your tasks and projects under control:
Review Goals and Objectives
There are times when our ambitions simply exceed our abilities and, no matter how much we wish to rise to the occasion, the goal is simply too high. Other times we haven’t prioritized what we really need to accomplish properly and are doing more work than is necessary. When setting goals and objectives, it is extremely valuable to determine exactly what is needed and why; however, the reality is that sometimes we may not realize these things until we’ve actually started working on a task. This is why it’s important to take some time to review goals and objectives after starting a task to see if the work that’s being done is equally important. This may result in prioritizing certain portions, changing the order of operations, or excluding steps or objectives because they’re less important or relevant to the final outcome. When doing this, a difficult choice must often be made to prioritize a short term objective while making a long term one more complicated. If these decisions are made lightly, it’s almost always a guarantee that it will be necessary again. To avoid this, make sure this is strongly considered at the time of the decision and, if a shift is made, make sure to schedule time for the long term issues soon after the short term deadlines are met.
Adjust Resources
When working on team projects, we often make allocations of resources based on the expense of an individual or tool. While this can make sense, it should always consider the productivity compared to the expense. Conversely, a cheaper resource may end up costing more for the amount of work done, but they may have more capacity than the more expensive resource. There may also be instances where a more expensive resource can be used to train a less experienced person on specific and limited tasks and to then check their work. Not only does this reduce issues of overworking your experienced people, but it also provides valuable experience to others on the team.
Training and/or Research
Most people are creatures of habit and will do what they know until they’re forced to do things differently. Others, however, strongly believe that “you don’t know what you don’t know” is a challenge to seek out more knowledge to find better ways to do things. These are the people who will get training to learn better techniques or more effective tools to use. Many of these will seek out solutions on their own so they can improve their effectiveness. If there are problems in the middle of a project, it sometimes makes sense to take one step back to be able to take two or three steps forward rather than plodding ahead at the same pace. This may seem like a waste of time while under pressure, but is often the necessary step to solving problems.
Technology
Technology has changed and will continue to change how much work one person is capable of doing. If your work involves repetitive tasks, there is almost always a tool to help do it faster and possibly better. A real world example where our company used technology to solve a problem: we took on a client who hadn’t done accounting in several years, but needed old bank records added to their accounting software. Past years couldn’t be imported from the bank into the software directly, but the bank statements were available. Rather than typing each entry in by hand, we scanned the documents and used software to read the text and numbers and write them into a spreadsheet as a single column of data. We then used formulas and macros to split the copied data into multiple rows and columns that the accounting software could read. This turned a job that would have taken multiple people over a week to complete into something a single person could do in several hours. Avoiding manual entry also increased the accuracy and allowed us to put checks in place to compare to the original records before importing them into the accounting software.
External resources
Sometimes it becomes necessary to bring in outside resources to complete a task on time. Perhaps it’s because some of your resources aren’t as available. Other times it’s because there’s a lack of the right knowledge or capabilities without enough time to learn them. Whatever the reason, there are usually options to bring in outside resources to supplement your team. While the cost of doing this may seem prohibitive, most experienced business leaders consider the cost of not doing so. This could be penalties or fines for not completing something on time or could be the loss of trust of a client as well as damage to the brand that prevents existing clients from staying or new clients from signing on. The other value of bringing in external resources is that they may provide ideas or skills that can be applied to your existing operations in the future.
While challenges can disrupt even the best planned projects or most routine tasks, knowing how to handle or navigate challenges can minimize those disruptions and solve problems.
- John Thrush