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.
What are the three stages of the ideal decision-making process?
Free discussion - Clear decision - Full support.
What is peer-group syndrome?
In a group of peers, individuals will tend to not go against the opinion of the group for fear of being the only one against the group.
In these cases, the peer plus one approach works best. The “plus one” is a senior manager or chairman.
What are the 3 stages of the planning process?
Step 1: Determine projected demand - what will the environment expect from you?
Step 2: Determine your present status.
Step 3: Figure out what you need to do to close the gap.
What two answers does a management-by-objectives (MBO) system need to answer?
1) Where do I want to go? This provides the objective.
2) How will I pace myself to see if I’m getting there? This gives us milestones, key results.
What are the three types of organizational structures?
Mission-oriented: a cell of employees focused on one objective, like a business unit focused on increasing revenue for a set product range.
Functional: the organization is divided into functional units (accounting, manufacturing, etc) who execute on their respective functions.
Hybrid: A combination of mission-oriented (business units) with functional units.
What is a CUA factor, and how does it affect how you manage employees?
CUA stands for complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. If an employee’s job has high CUA, then you need to rely on motivating them through cultural values. If there’s a low CUA, you can rely on contractual obligations.
What are the two ways that a manager can elicit peak performance from employees?
A manager can increase an employee’s performance through either training or motivation. This is a manager’s most important responsibility.
What is an effective way to think about how to motivate employees?
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides a good framework for understanding what motivates people. Needs create drives and motivation to act. At the base of the pyramid, you have physiological needs, followed above by safety needs, social/affiliation needs, esteem/recognition needs, and finally, at the top, self-actualization needs.
The key to drive people to achieve peak performance is to help them satisfy all needs but self-actualization.
Additionally, setting up ways to measure and compare performance will create natural competitiveness, which is a great way to stimulate motivation. Andy talks about this as creating a “racetrack” for your employees.
What metric can you apply to decide which management style to use with an employee?
Task-relevant maturity (TRM) is a measure of how skilled an employee is at a particular job. For any one person, they will have different TRM for different jobs.
If TRM is high, you can use MBOs to manage.
If TRM is medium, you need to use more two-way communication and mutual reasoning.
If TRM is low, you need to use a very structured, task-based approach, describing the what, the when, and the how.
