“I’m not sure that I understand time span,” Morgan said. “It’s not that I am resisting the idea, I’m just not sure how it works.”
“Let’s say I have a task that I want to delegate,” I explained, rolling up my sleeves. “I call you in and we discuss it. I lay out the delegation, talk about the performance standards. You have questions, we create an action plan. The meeting is over.
“From that moment, you begin to work ahead without my direction. You use your own independent discretionary judgment and finally complete the task.
“You arrive back in my office and say, ‘Okay, I’m all done!’ You clap your hands together and say, ‘What’s next?’
“You have just established the time span for that task and now need my direction on what to do next. Perhaps it was three days, maybe a week, whatever it took.
“Morgan, whenever I look at a position in the company, I always look at the time span for the various tasks that have to be completed. Time span indicates the complexity of the task. The longer the time span, the more complex is the task.
“Most companies underestimate the complexity of most roles in the organization and then are surprised when people fail to perform. By using time span as the measuring stick, we can be much more precise about the level of complexity.” -TF
Other than observing the actual time span to detmine time needed, do you have any other way of assessing this? It is always a challenge to assign a task or project and set a reasonable time span.
We work mostly on projects. I estimate the time for completion when I first make the assignments. Then, I follow up on a weekly basis to determine progress and make adjustments to due dates. Thats how I’ve always done it. Is there a better way?
Lowell,
Thanks for the question. Time span on manual tasks is generally pretty easy because you can observe and clock them, eventually setting a benchmark. Supervisor and manager tasks may require more thought. For example, what is the time span for bringing an entry level employee up to certified competence level in the operation of a specific machine? What is the time span (in the area of safety) for bringing a work comp mod down below a 1x multiple? These tasks will require more than a couple of weeks, indeed a number of months.
“Most companies underestimate the complexity of most roles in the organization and then are surprised when people fail to perform.
Sure feels good to hear someone say this. Many times I’ve sweated out the clock, not because I couldn’t perform the task, but because of external factors like, “oh, she’s out with the flu” or IT is working on getting us that download but it will be a couple of days for them to rebuild the files. Sometimes these factors add up, but many times what upper mgmt sees is YOU were late with the reports.