Solving problems is not specifically a management task, but managers are faced with a lot of daily problems that need to be solved.  As a manager you have a slightly different set of resources than your employees.  So how do you, as a manager, go about solving your issues?  There are ten ways that management solves problems.

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Most of us believe our companies have adequate “web presence”, considering the time and money we spend. We have a web site (Figure 1) — maybe it’s not on a level with the big consumer companies, but it tells visitors all they need to know about our company and our products/services, and it’s user-friendly.

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In the first part of this article, we discussed Workplace Change and the Speed of Information. In part two, we complete our discussion with a look at information technology’s effect on Social Systems, Skills Displacement, and the Dynamics of Information Technology.

Social Systems

Questions in the information age have been surfacing, causing rifts in the social system of the organization. Changes in thought are occurring as part of the cultural transformation. Work groups are forming as workers move away from linear processing (assembly lines) and toward other models and dynamics, yet we are glued to the computer more. Social interaction as our parents and grandparents knew it is on the decline. Organizations will be forced to adopt changes in order to survive in the fast-paced information age.

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From its inception, information technology has been changing the way business is done. IT is changing the basis of business from labor and manual skills to knowledge management. The jobs required by information technology, as well as the technology itself, are changing the social system of your organization. Furthermore, information technology is key to a firm’s competitiveness — organizations that are unable to adapt to the rapid pace of technology change will not survive in the marketplace of the future.

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You’ve written a new procedure.  Your procedure review identified completeness, correctness, and subject matter applicability.  You feel you’ve caught your procedure writing errors and the procedure’s ready to go…but go where?  How do you determine if your new procedure is working?

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Business and organizational development is about business process change: not as in “process change – the event”, but “process change – the journey“.  Your business processes change in response to market forces, competition, regulations, customer demand, the economy, culture, personal beliefs, and many other factors.  The question isn’t about what is causing the business process changes — we know your business processes are going to change — the question is…

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Today, everything is a project with more and more people finding themselves in a project management role of some type.  You don’t have to have the title of Project Manager to manage projects.

A Project is a temporary collection of related tasks to achieve a desired and usually unique result.

What do you think? Do you find yourself managing a collection of related tasks to achieve a desired result?  If so, you qualify as a project manager.  Businesses today are evolving, downsizing, and pushing more work down the organization chart.  You may be a project manager and not know it.  But what if you haven’t been trained as a Project Manager with the necessary skill and tool sets?

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The process maps we described in recent weeks are tools for you in your role as data collector and analyst: your role is to craft and communicate a story for change and improvement that people understand, accept, support, and will ultimately act on.  As you move from gathering data about the current process to improving it, you need tools to help communicate your improvement plan and train participants on the new process,

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Change management is at the heart of programs like ITIL, lean, ISO, or six sigma.  Change and improvement needs to occur on a regular basis, but it does not happen by accident.  It takes commitment from top management.  How does top management show their commitment?

Two ways – budget and a show!  That’s right you need to fuel innovation for change and improvement and budgets are what top management understand. 

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You have identified a problem, and you have made an immediate correction to fix it for now.  How do you make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again?

That is the role of corrective action in continual improvement of an organization.  In a reactive organization, we constantly react to problems in a corrective mode.  We make the short term fixes – over and over and over again. 

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