Management models: plan or budget?
We are accustomed to dividing the world around us in half: good and evil, quickly and slowly, measured and soaked. The economy is also divided: on planned and market. Programming is also divided: imperative and decorative. And management is also divided: on plan and situational ...
We all sooner or later got the question of how best to conduct their business? We tried to build a plan and almost always broke it. We tried to take the task in vain and did not get what we wanted. Sooner or later we came to some middle ground and our tasks became “just as needed” and “almost on time”.
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The thing is that sooner or later we come to a mixed management model, without realizing it. What is a mixed management model? First you need to understand what is mixed. And two models are mixed up - planned and situational. To answer the question "what is a situational model," we will have to move away from it towards the planned model and summarize all the theses about it. The planned model is:
According to the planned model, it is easy to build a critical path and quite realistically follow it.
The planning model has all the advantages, except for one thing - the real life and the world around them do not live according to plan, but according to events, according to the situation. In fact, some events that we could not predict in advance, intervene in our plan and interrupt work to solve more urgent and priority tasks. Often, with inexperienced management or lack of time and money, the timing of planned work is halved or tripled due to unexpected problems, tasks, and incidents. It is enough to watch from the outside for any construction project (for example, at a neighbor’s dacha), or for repairing your car in service (how many times it happened that there is no necessary spare part).
Do you know how the police station works? The usual department of internal affairs, where there is a duty unit, an investigator, precinct and patrol and inspection service. This department works on a mixed management model. In normal times, everyone works according to a plan and the planned management model is fully implemented: the district police officers visit unsuccessful alcoholics, sometimes they help the investigators. Investigators do business and transfer them to the prosecutor’s office and the court. PPSniki travel around the area entrusted to them for calls and patrol cases. The duty unit poisons jokes and answers the phone.
But at a certain moment information about the “situation” comes to the duty unit. The situation requires an immediate response, and the PPS outfit leaves for the site. The dress assesses the situation and causes a cordon, an investigator and a condition. At the scene, investigators begin to work, organized the inquiry, clarification of the circumstances. Precinct interrogate eyewitnesses.
Not many of us have seen such situations, but all of us have heard of attacks on collectors, hostage taking, and other situations requiring immediate resolution.
The situational model is much simpler than planned:
This model is not designed to solve everyday problems, but for that it solves the problem quickly. Then the situation that has arisen almost does not disrupt the plan, but only takes a little time from the "reserved just in case."
When the leaders learned how to work with the situational model, they began to divide the situations according to “similarity”. Developed schemes and instructions for solving standard situations. We trained special people to solve non-standard situations. Later, the leaders divided the people involved in the planned work and situational - so the power was divided into two branches: legislative and executive. Within each branch, too, was divided in two, and this division went down to the bottom, to the police station. Where there is a faculty and non-departmental - constantly working on the situation and able to solve standard problems. Where is the investigator, 90% of the time working according to plan. There is no need for SOBR in each branch, but these people who are able to work in a non-standard new situation always exist.
We are building IT and we love plan models very much: scrum, kanban and other models that work according to the principle “you need to do this ... then that”. We all do not like bugs on a live system, do not like when an urgent marketing task from the management arrives. This is because these urgent, essentially wedging in our planned, measured process, disrupt it, lower the indicators of the department and our personal ones. This is because we did not divide people into two groups - planned and situational, because our team does not have an IT-SOBR that is ready to quickly plug any leaks.
In my project, I divided everything into 3 categories:
I solve the tasks of the latter category myself - I know the architecture, the code, the servers, and I can shut up even at night with a drunk.
The task of a situational nature is solved by a team of two people - the front end and the sysadmin. This combination is no accident: a lot of sudden tasks - either marketing, or "something broke." In order not to hire another backend developer, we wrote the entire marketing backend on NodeJs and it is easily ruled by the front end developer (we have a good one). The marketing release is separate from the planned release of the application and can be made at any time.
Planned tasks are solved by a team of developers over kanban.
In the end: there is a result, and satisfied people (everyone likes their mode and work style).
PS This was an introductory post about management models, I want to devote a cycle of articles to this and tell in detail about each something new and useful.
PPS And we are developing here the Note Space service, which is just designed to manage our time in any form: planned or situational.
We all sooner or later got the question of how best to conduct their business? We tried to build a plan and almost always broke it. We tried to take the task in vain and did not get what we wanted. Sooner or later we came to some middle ground and our tasks became “just as needed” and “almost on time”.
')
The thing is that sooner or later we come to a mixed management model, without realizing it. What is a mixed management model? First you need to understand what is mixed. And two models are mixed up - planned and situational. To answer the question "what is a situational model," we will have to move away from it towards the planned model and summarize all the theses about it. The planned model is:
- Having a list of tasks that need to be solved.
- The presence of the term of their decision.
- The presence of forces and means.
- Priorities and order of tasks, dependencies.
- Understanding the estimation error and availability of time and resources.
According to the planned model, it is easy to build a critical path and quite realistically follow it.
The planning model has all the advantages, except for one thing - the real life and the world around them do not live according to plan, but according to events, according to the situation. In fact, some events that we could not predict in advance, intervene in our plan and interrupt work to solve more urgent and priority tasks. Often, with inexperienced management or lack of time and money, the timing of planned work is halved or tripled due to unexpected problems, tasks, and incidents. It is enough to watch from the outside for any construction project (for example, at a neighbor’s dacha), or for repairing your car in service (how many times it happened that there is no necessary spare part).
Do you know how the police station works? The usual department of internal affairs, where there is a duty unit, an investigator, precinct and patrol and inspection service. This department works on a mixed management model. In normal times, everyone works according to a plan and the planned management model is fully implemented: the district police officers visit unsuccessful alcoholics, sometimes they help the investigators. Investigators do business and transfer them to the prosecutor’s office and the court. PPSniki travel around the area entrusted to them for calls and patrol cases. The duty unit poisons jokes and answers the phone.
But at a certain moment information about the “situation” comes to the duty unit. The situation requires an immediate response, and the PPS outfit leaves for the site. The dress assesses the situation and causes a cordon, an investigator and a condition. At the scene, investigators begin to work, organized the inquiry, clarification of the circumstances. Precinct interrogate eyewitnesses.
Not many of us have seen such situations, but all of us have heard of attacks on collectors, hostage taking, and other situations requiring immediate resolution.
The situational model is much simpler than planned:
- The main goal: to solve the situation and return to the planned model
- All possible (and reasonable) forces and means are used to maximize the speed of the solution.
- Planned affairs are thrown and all planned activities are placed in the background.
This model is not designed to solve everyday problems, but for that it solves the problem quickly. Then the situation that has arisen almost does not disrupt the plan, but only takes a little time from the "reserved just in case."
When the leaders learned how to work with the situational model, they began to divide the situations according to “similarity”. Developed schemes and instructions for solving standard situations. We trained special people to solve non-standard situations. Later, the leaders divided the people involved in the planned work and situational - so the power was divided into two branches: legislative and executive. Within each branch, too, was divided in two, and this division went down to the bottom, to the police station. Where there is a faculty and non-departmental - constantly working on the situation and able to solve standard problems. Where is the investigator, 90% of the time working according to plan. There is no need for SOBR in each branch, but these people who are able to work in a non-standard new situation always exist.
We are building IT and we love plan models very much: scrum, kanban and other models that work according to the principle “you need to do this ... then that”. We all do not like bugs on a live system, do not like when an urgent marketing task from the management arrives. This is because these urgent, essentially wedging in our planned, measured process, disrupt it, lower the indicators of the department and our personal ones. This is because we did not divide people into two groups - planned and situational, because our team does not have an IT-SOBR that is ready to quickly plug any leaks.
In my project, I divided everything into 3 categories:
- Planned
- Situational
- "Nobody except us"
I solve the tasks of the latter category myself - I know the architecture, the code, the servers, and I can shut up even at night with a drunk.
The task of a situational nature is solved by a team of two people - the front end and the sysadmin. This combination is no accident: a lot of sudden tasks - either marketing, or "something broke." In order not to hire another backend developer, we wrote the entire marketing backend on NodeJs and it is easily ruled by the front end developer (we have a good one). The marketing release is separate from the planned release of the application and can be made at any time.
Planned tasks are solved by a team of developers over kanban.
In the end: there is a result, and satisfied people (everyone likes their mode and work style).
PS This was an introductory post about management models, I want to devote a cycle of articles to this and tell in detail about each something new and useful.
PPS And we are developing here the Note Space service, which is just designed to manage our time in any form: planned or situational.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/294630/
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