Nothing to it. Just get out your
calculator and organize an efficient investment of resources, then implement,
monitor, adjust.
If it were that simple, of course,
there would be no need for expensive managers. Just resources, planners and
monitors. Here’s how it would work:
At its simplest, the list of
resources is a short one:
TIME
MONEY
PEOPLE
EVERYTHING ELSE (Facilities,
materials, etc.)
Time is the most rigid of the resources.
Everybody has the same amount of
it. It just ticks away, one second at a time, sixty seconds per minute, sixty
minutes per hour.
Einstein theorized that time
becomes flexible as one nears the speed of light, but since few of us work at
that rate, Einsteinian time is not an issue.
In reality, time is a great tool
for measuring the investment of the other resources against results, and that’s
it. It is a tool for making value decisions, but otherwise contributes nothing.
A deadline’s value is in what a person or group can accomplish by a given
moment. The people action is what’s important.
Money is the universal resource.
Everything can be converted into a
cost. If you have enough money, you can buy whatever you can absorb of any
other resource.
The People resource, for example,
can be calculated in terms of “fully loaded labor cost.” That means a person’s
salary and fringes plus the person’s proportionate share of cost of the
organization’s common amenities: the building, insurance, air conditioning,
marketing, etc.
If everyone in a company were of
exactly the same value to the organization, you could divide its total cost of
operation for a week by the number of employes. That would tell you how much
each employe was costing the company, and therefore how much value that worker
should provide for the company to break even on employing that person.
Things aren’t that simple in the
workplace, but you get the idea. Money makes everything else possible, but has
no intrinsic value of its own.
Let’s skip to Everything Else.
Here you can have construction
materials, computer databases, office furniture, whatever. None of it does
anything but sit there (costing money and probably deteriorating) without the
wise use of it by human beings.
Information can be vitally
important, in a Project or other activity, but only if it is known, understood
and properly employed by people.
The “everything else” category is
the one that, in general, can be replaced or substituted for by other
resources. For example, if you have enough time you can swing an old-fashioned
hammer instead of using an air-operated nailer. If you have enough money you can
buy more raw materials.
The People resource is the central and most meaningful of the
resources. Without it, the other resources have no meaning. They don’t do
anything.
Under weak management, the people
involved in getting things done are seen as the “adapter” in the scheme of
things When you run out of time, make people donate time by working extra
hours. Withhold overtime, and you save money, too.
If the Project suddenly hits an
unexpected problem or picks up some added requirements, you can’t afford to
bust the budget or miss the deadline – so you push the people harder.
In a properly planned Project or
other activity, the human resource is not an adapter. The people who staff the
Project have been carefully “estimated” to fit the requirements by devoting
reasonable time to the effort. The result has been defined, and all
the resources – including the human one – have been organized to get it done.
Again in simple terms, the overall “investment” can be represented in a
formula:
Time
+ $$$ + Everything Else x Human Effort = Outcome
T + $ + E x H = O
Time is added, along with Money
and Everything Else. The role of
Human Effort is that of a catalytic
multiplier employing the other resources to achieve the planned Outcome.
If something happens, say the
deadline is suddenly moved up to hit a window of opportunity in the
marketplace, something has been subtracted from the T.
Logic – or good management – says O will be proportionately reduced,
unless a sufficient increase is made in one of the other elements on the
lefthand side of the equation.
Instead, what frequently happens
is a greater burden is placed on the less-measurable human resource. Can’t you
hear it now? “Let’s just take a few of these people sitting around drinking
coffee and get another few minutes of work a day out of each of them.” Bingo!
Problem solved.
You do that a few times – and it
can work over the short term if the people care about the organization and
believe in the Project – and you wear the human resource down. Its productivity
declines. People get tired and uninspired. You miss the deadline (time), run
over budget (money) and still have a poorer result (Outcome).
So the substitution of human
effort for other resources is of very limited value, and in fact usually is
negative.
And, of course, if the enthusiasm
was not there to begin with, there was not even a short-term gain.
However, the biggest price paid
for such mismanagement is the effect it has on the people. They learn to
distrust managers and their plans. They learn to protect themselves. They play
the game as survivors, placing no value on courage, commitment or extra effort.
You won’t get them back.
In short, you have blown the most
precious resource.
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