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Oracle Tips by Burleson |
Managing
Workload
One sub-team in a company supports data transfers
to and from other companies in a highly-regulated industry. There are
tremendous amounts of data passing back and forth on a continual basis
and the workload is very demanding. This group has been understaffed
for years, and the manager had not been afforded the opportunity to
augment the staff with additional resources.
The change management system that feeds the work
to the manager’s attention for this team has an upfront approval
process of which the manager is not a member. The projects and tasks
are approved without any consideration given to the current workload;
thus, no strategic project management exists. The target dates for
each project and task are determined in a vacuum, exclusive of other
work in the pipeline.
This can quickly become a major problem for
managing workload and meeting target dates when the work just comes in
on top of everything else currently scheduled or waiting to be
started. Many projects are defined as priority one, so how does a
manager prioritize these except for working towards completing those
that have the most imminent requested completion dates? Throw the
unplanned problems and emergency requests that come in on a regular
basis into the mix and this becomes a very difficult situation for
quantifying, measuring, and tracking employee commitments because the
commitments continually change in an unplanned manner.
Even in such a volatile environment, setting
specific dates by which tasks should be completed is completely
appropriate and useful. At least the attempt can be made to push out
the commitment dates and change priorities if necessary. Attention
should be given to the level or complexity of work assignments. An IT
employee who regularly works on the most complex tasks or assumes a
leadership role should be recognized for these efforts.
In these situations, it is understood that such
technical leaders may, at times, produce a lesser quantity of work as
a tradeoff for managing a much more difficult project. Balancing
measures for the quality and quantity of work plus over-and-above
contributions are a good foundation to gauge performance.
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