Task management

Wheew! I have been so busy I have hardly had any time to just sit and think. Between major projects at work, home, consulting, and checking into other opportunities, It has just been go go go, full throttle. None the less I am happy to be this busy as opposed to the alternative.

One of the things I have been working on that is always in constant improvement is better time, task, and project management. In the past I was writing tasks down in my notebook and checking them off as I completed them. That system works ok, but it has some flaws. For one there is no ranking of tasks and ranking tasks can be very handy if you are like me where you have a lot of small tasks that are not related to each other. Each of them have their own weight. Some have to be dealt with in real time, some can wait a few hours, and some can be put off until sometime in the future because they may require other actions or resources that are external to the task or to you.

I use forced ranking where everything is assigned a number 1-9 and then each task is then rated. So I might have on or two 1's which is what I am currently working on. Then five or six 2's which would be next in the pecking order, and so on. The higher the number, 9 being the heaviest, the lower the priority.

Another area the note pad fails is categorization. All of the tasks I do no matter how big or small can be categorized. And categorization is most helpful in determining where the bulk of my time is spent. I can look back at completed tasks and say "Wow! I spend 60% of my time doing 'A' how can I improve that so I can do more of 'B' and 'C'?" With categorization I can also look at future tasks and better plan my time.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in the note pad task management system is visibility. In the notepad system the information is only available to me. In my current position I have to be able to say yes or no to a request and if I give a no, I better be able to justify that no. Simply saying "I'm only one man" or "I am to busy" is not enough for management. Management does not track my time and has no clue as to what my day to day goings on are or what projects I am working on currently. For all intents everything to them is a mouse click away. They are end users themselves and because of that there is no concept of time when it comes to deploying a new solution or fixing a problem. And this is especially true in manufacturing where everything is tangible.

From a manufacturing management perspective, you know exactly how much time and effort it takes to produce one widget. From the acquisition of raw materials to produce the product to shipping the final product, everything is touched by multiple people and every step is recorded and measured. You can not say the same of an IT/IS department. There are generally accepted understandings by everyone in the company as to how much time it takes to do a task that relates to your product. That is not the case with my department. Few people in the company have a good understanding of software in any detail. And fewer have ever had any exposure to the inner workings IS/IT services. Again the notion is every thing is plug-n-play or point-and-click.

This presents an opportunity to solve two issues. The first issue of course is time/task management for myself. The second issue and arguably the greater of the two, is effective communications with people outside of the department. The perception is that I am at my computer for the majority of the day. I do not effect production, so therefore I must have lots of free time. And since it is a perception and not reality then that empowers me to change the perception.

I'll post next on the steps I have taken to change that perception and the early effects it has had on me and the department.