Key Terms and Concepts Flashcards
What is a limiting step?
A limiting step is what creates the critical path in a project. It is generally the longest step in a process. It is the step in a process that forms the overall shape of your workflow, as you will organize activities in parallel with it and in preparation of it.
What are offsets and how are they related to limiting steps?
You should offset, or stagger, the completion of activities in your workflow around the limiting step. Generally, you should work backward from the final milestone and stagger the work activities needed around the limiting step.
How can you apply production quality inspection rules to other types of work?
Quality inspection steps include incoming inspection on raw materials, in-process inspection, and final inspections. If your employee is building a presentation, you can inspect her initial outline before she applies her time (raw materials) to building the deck. Before she’s completed it, you can check in to see how its being formatted. Then, you can review the final draft before its sent out to a customer (shipped).
At which stage in any work process should you try to discover and correct any quality issues?
Try to discover and solve problems at the lowest-value stage possible; therein, you don’t waste time and resources building on flawed work.
What are 5 indicators that you can use to help guide your daily decisions?
Daily Sales Forecast - how many units of output do you need to deliver today?
Raw Material Inventory - how many resources (time, energy, money) do you have to complete the needed output?
Equipment - is anything broken that needs repair (body, car, house, etc)?
Manpower - do you have enough people today to produce your required output?
Quality - what is customer perception of what you’ve produced?
These should all be physical, countable things.
What are examples of other indicators that you can use to inform your judgement?
A linearity indicator: a graph which shows current output over time, plotted against a line of average output needed to achieve some goal.
A stagger chart: a table that plots future output forecasts in each row. Each month, you update by adding a new row, noting what the actual output was and noting what your updated forecasts are for upcoming months.
What is a manager’s output?
The output of his organization + the output of other organizations under his influence.
What is one way to categorize the activities that a manager performs?
Information-gathering, nudging, decision making, being a role model.
What is leverage?
Leverage is the measure of the output generated by any given managerial activity. = L1 x A1 + L2 x A2 + ….
What is managerial meddling?
Interfering in the work of others without positively contributing to their output.
Delegation without follow-through is…?
Abdication
What is one way to increase the productivity of your activities?
Take an example from the production process: batching similar tasks. Each different type of activity requires its own set-up time. For each instance of set-up time, if you are able to batch complete a common set of tasks that share the same set-up requirements, then you are effectively using your time.
Why is adding slack into your schedules important?
Slack, i.e. looseness in your schedule, is critical to ensure that unanticipated things will not set you off course.
What’s one of the critical points of meetings?
Batch together all questions about a specific issue so that you can ask them all at once, and avoid interruptions during the week.
What are the two main types of meetings?
Process-oriented, and mission-oriented. The goal of process-oriented meetings is to share knowledge and gather information. These include one-on-ones, staff meetings, and operation reviews (where a manager presents his progress). The goal of mission-oriented meetings is to make decisions.
