Planning and Scheduling Work
The Rationale
In a classic article printed in the July-August 1975 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Henry Mintzberg describes the discrepancy between the textbook view of management and the way managers actually spend their time. Titled “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact,” the article points out that managers pay lip service to planning, scheduling, directing, and controlling but spend their time at an unrelenting pace juggling activities that are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity.
The studies by Peters and Waterman more recently support Mintzberg’s description of effective executives as strongly oriented to action with a dislike of reflecting activities. On the average, managers shift activities every 8 minutes. While relatively little time is spent planning and scheduling, it is essential that this time be quality time—quiet, uninterrupted, reflective time. In this module, we strengthen the skills and impart the techniques for planning, scheduling, and organizing work.
Learning Objectives for the Workshop
Participants who attend the workshop will be able to:
- Identify the major factors contributing to resistance to change
- Describe at least 5 ways to manage change and deal with negative attitudes
- Illustrate each stage of the management cycle with personal examples
- List the characteristics of goal-oriented and activity-oriented employees
- Evaluate the feasibility of action plans against the goals they should achieve
- Describe the procedure for preparing a Gantt chart and a PERT network
- Identify the 6 work elements and the process of work simplification
- Designate which planning techniques are appropriate for repetitive vs. one-time operations
Performance Criteria in the Workplace
Participants who attend this workshop will be able to:
- Cultivate commitment by involving employees appropriately in the planning process
- Apply the 4-stage management cycle to projects and daily routines
- Supervise people based on how goal-oriented vs. activity-oriented they are
- Use PERT to calculate the critical path and control time or costs
- Factor one’s time or cost estimates, based on the normal distribution curve
- Prepare a Gantt chart to plan, schedule, and control a project
- Analyze the present flow of work, using the 6 work elements
- Apply work simplification techniques to repetitive tasks (work smarter, not harder)