As Time Goes By
Often when you strike up a conversation with someone who you haven’t seen for a while, comments such as “I can’t believe how quickly time has flown” or “it just seems like yesterday since…” are often quite common.
Everyone comments how busy we all are, and how many things we all have to do or how much juggling of spinning plates we do.
It’s the same in our work lives there are many threads of activity running in parallel all seeking to command attention. Some tasks fare better than others, with some to-do items languishing at the bottom of the list on a semi-permanent basis.
Time is a precious commodity both in terms of time spent and elapsed time.
For organisations, time is a critical factor in many ways dependent on the nature of that business. There are few that I can think of, if any, where time is not relevant.
In many organisations that I visit for the first time, I find that they have evolved spreadsheet-based tracking systems in order to manage their performance against time. The human effort to keep such tracking systems current and accurate is not insignificant, equally it provides no support for actually getting the job done on time. Other organisations may lack tracking capability and wonder why complaints arise due to untimely actions on their part. Organisations which are slow to respond then face unnecessary demand to respond to chaser calls and letters (this is “failure demand” in “systems thinking” terms or non-value adding time in activity based costing terms).
The most agile organisations have a keen eye on time, act in a timely manner, avoiding unnecessary work and are admired for providing timely service.
In the workflow and BPM domain, time is a key facet of the technology. The Singularity Process Platform provides extremely comprehensive facilities to support organisations in keeping on top of time, whether this is through defining the timescales over which processes and tasks execute, or for tracking the amount of time spent on work (as part of work performance) or finally in terms of effective escalation management. Finally the ability to have an accurate chronology of how you have dealt with something could well be a last line-of-defence when challenged on this front.
Without these facilities at your disposal, your organisation risks being at the beck and call of time, rather than it being yours to manage for the benefit of your organisation and customers.
Perhaps its TIME to look at how your organisation is performing on this front in order to improve how you are doing.
Author : Paul O’Neill
