Chapter 4: Doing The Job
As a manager, you assume many roles to ensure your team delivers on expected results; this is known as oversight. Part of oversight is planning, the start of all successful execution, and the focus of this lesson. And while we can't address the specific planning requirements of your particular job, some concepts commonly apply.
Establishing Accuracy
One of the first things to prepare for is how your team receives and disseminates regular assignments. Consider how a unit of work is delivered to you:
Is it from an approved source?
Is it clear and consistent?
Is it timely?
Is it trackable?
Is it reasonable?
Is priority clear and correctly used?
Is policy being followed?
These are the types of things to look for before proper planning is even possible. If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you're not being set up for success. Work with your boss and possibly your stakeholders to get the situation resolved.
Once you know a work request arrives correctly, you need to ensure it's appropriately assigned. This effort evaluates the work unit for priority, turnaround, available resources, costs, conflicting activities, and policy adherence. You could do this yourself as the work comes in, or you could develop a system that empowers your team to handle it themselves, allowing you to focus on other issues. If you do setup such a process, it must include exception handling to engage you (or another escalation point) when issues arise.
Note: If the work you manage is project-oriented rather than transactional, you should be tracking them using readily available project management tools. This allows you to keep projects on track while providing a forecast of resource and skill requirements, alerting you of conflicts before they become a crisis. Such problem avoidance is part of anticipation as you learned in the previous lesson. Note: If you’ve never managed a project using available tools, I highly recommend seeking training. There are plenty of free lessons to be found online, but you can also speak to your boss about formal instruction.
Establishing Priority
Getting priority right is vital to operating smoothly and meeting commitments. Work orders should arrive with a desired and realistic priority; if every task is an emergency, then nothing is. Similarly, if there is no sense of priority, it's left for the assignee to decide. At best, you'll get a undesirable first-in-first-out result. So, working with the requester, your job is to evaluate tasks for:
Urgency: whether a delay results in a negative business impact. For example, a missed deadline may violate a contractual commitment. Urgency is the most common predictor of priority level since it's time-bound and should already be established by the work request.
Value: the importance of the work to the organization. For example, the completion date is critical to satisfying forecasted revenue. If the requester does not establish value, you need to work with them to understand it.
Effort: how challenging or complex the work is to complete. For example, the job requires multiple people, can only be implemented during specific windows, or needs resources not on hand. Effort is something that you and your team will ascertain.
Preemption: can work already in progress be interrupted in favor of new work. For example, an emergency repair needed to restore service from an outage. Your business or department may have definitions for when preemption is permitted (such as an emergency), or you may function in a strictly non-preemptive system.
Gauging a task's level of precedence allows you to optimize work queues. Prioritization will guide you in moving one task ahead of another, assigning and reassigning work to optimize resources, fulfilling assignments concurrently, and dealing with the inevitable times when your team is overwhelmed. Understanding priority and optimization in addition to effort is the only way to develop a completion date.
Being overwhelmed, asked to exceed capacity, or handle multiple emergencies at the same time is something you should have anticipated, challenges arise and must be handled. Some ways you could prepare include staff cross-training, setting over-time expectations, and establishing a reward system for extra-effort.
However, priority conflicts should not be the status quo. Rescheduling of the same tasks and/or tasks that never get completed are warning signs that your team is thrashing. While thrashing may mean you need more resources, it's just as likely due to poor workload prioritization. Regardless, you must work with superiors and stakeholders to resolve this condition.
Negotiating Turnaround
When negotiating the turnaround time of a work order, the key is clear and proactive communication. Start by assessing the task requirements, requested deadline, and your current workload. If the assigned deadline seems unrealistic, provide a well-reasoned explanation for why the task may require more time. Include key factors like task complexity, availability of skilled resources, competing priorities, or conflicting activities that make the task high-risk or even unfeasible within the requested time frame.
Next, propose an alternative timeline. Offer a new, realistic completion date that takes into account both your capacity and the task’s importance. Frame this as a solution that ensures the task will be done thoroughly without compromising quality. Be open to compromise—ask if certain parts of the task can be prioritized or broken into phases to accommodate deadlines. By offering a transparent assessment and alternative plan, you not only demonstrate professionalism but also set a foundation for effective, trust-based collaboration.
Executing the Work
Once work is correctly assigned within your team, you've accepted personal responsibility for its completion. The last thing you want is your boss asking why a completion date was missed or why defects were encountered. If such issues blindside your superiors, you're failing at the job; you must monitor the work that your team is expected to deliver.
Using whatever tools you’re provided, observe your team's work queues regularly. How regular depends on the quantity, complexity, and turnaround of assignments. Useful monitoring requires that your team make consistent and meaningful updates regarding their progress. It’s essential that your team accurately document all difficulties with their work efforts. This must be done timely and include the potential impact on quality and deadlines. It's your responsibility to ensure these updates are occurring; if not, get it fixed. Without this information you can’t monitor your team’s efforts, you can’t anticipate problems or conflicts, and you’ll likely hear about commitment failures from your boss and your stakeholders. That’s not where you want to be!
When you see that a commitment is in jeopardy, meet with the assignee to get back on track. You may need to re-arrange or reassign work, obtain or re-allocate raw-materials or other resources, or you may need to roll-up your sleeves to help. In worst-case scenarios, you may need to reschedule the work. Make sure there are no alternatives before doing this; seek guidance from your superiors if you’re the least bit unsure. When speaking to your boss, be sure you've evaluated all the factors contributing to the problem. Be prepared with solutions, including how you’ll avoid the situation in the future. At the very least this confirms that you are monitoring your team and have taken ownership of your job. While no-one will be happy with a delay, you'll establish credibility as a manager who has embraced oversight.
Some delays may be the result of poor quality; for example, you may have noticed a staff member repeatedly making the same mistakes. But defects that arise after service or product has been delivered present a different set of obstacles; such issues will be near impossible to detect by looking at task queues. Its most likely that these defects are the result of insufficient testing and verification procedures. While measuring the quality of your team's output is beyond the scope of this course, it's entirely your responsibility to ensure adequate verification is in place. And it goes without saying, if staff members are repeatedly guilty of poor quality, you need to resolve that too.
You are ultimately accountable for your team's output; the work must be accurately managed from start to finish, and the results must be delivered as expected and committed to.