Thursday, November 27, 2014

Empowering Your Workload to Work for You (Part II)



I hadn’t meant to spend time on this Micromanagement thing, but as you well can see from what little I’ve pointed out there is a lot to it. The main concern is how you deal with the stress of micromanaging your team.

As I mentioned in my last post: Project managers develop their own methodology some like to stay closely informed where as others just want an approximation of facts. What I failed to do is mention the other two types of madness, I mean management methodology. The Macro Manager and the Situational Manager and if I hadn’t mentioned it we have all three in our office. There is myself the detailed guy and a middle man then the one who is in charge being the situational manager type.

These three tiers work well for us, the man in the middle can take over for each other anytime one of us needs a break. This wasn’t planned it just happened, however if we do take a stress break we take the work to a point to whereas it will not burden the next guy filling the shoes.

Time Management

I mentioned lastly in the previous blog about time management. OH! So crucial and necessary, no matter how well you can remember things no matter how well you yourself are put together there will be the OOPS-Factor! There are no real apps on you tablet or phone to help you with this. “This comes from within, young Pad won”!

I can even tell you exactly how I do it, I just know even if you have to write it down, put it on a task list or calendar do it. The most important thing is to put it down somewhere on a schedule, and remind your Team it is subject to change. I do change very easy, my techs? Not so well, remember to remind them that it changed for a reason; IT is a service industry and as important issues come up there will be things that are time sensitive such as a server or security issue that won’t be as important to fixing that end-user workstation.


The next thing is to stay calm in every situation, it’s like flowing water, just as it looks the same it’s not, it changes every micro second. It’s hard to stay calm when you are drowning right? It is also hard to swim if you panic.

Empowering Your Workload to Work For You



As managers we have to stay ahead of the game, or as close to as we possibly can. We do this so can bring a project in on time with the maximum efficiently that you and the team can effectively do. Project managers find themselves in one of three categories. Which one are you?



Project managers develop their own methodology some like to stay closely informed where as others just want an approximation of facts, (what stage is it at and are we on time). In my company we have a three tier management persona. Firstly is the one who takes care of the Deployments and see that every detail gets done. This is the MICRO MANAGER. You see there is that one person who is on top of the details and the enter-workings all the time by assigning their work, asking the techs about job details while helping resolve those pesky minor problems and all the way up to the big ones. Sometimes if it calls for reassigning tasks to others so that no one gets slighted.



These project managers assign work in small chunks - maybe just a day at a time. They could goes as far as a week or two in advance while changing things along the way by reassigning tasks so that things work smoothly and get done. The unfortunate side effect to this type of management causes that PM to spend so much time in the details that it takes away from the daily tasks resulting in longer completion times, causing ulcers and frustrations. It is fortunate that because of experience I am aware of this and have developed self-discipline. This is where TIME MANAGEMENT comes in