Marge had a frustrated look on her face. “I am just about fed up to here. I spend more time counseling and correcting than I do controlling the work.” She had just emerged from a round with the shipping dock. Four orders had been mis-packed and two orders had the wrong ship address. Luckily, the errors were found before the freight company picked up, but the orders would now be delayed another day.

“What do you think the problem is?” I asked.

“Well, Martin just doesn’t seem to be catching on. He has been here for five weeks, now and I swear it’s like he is still in his first week. He is supposed to be matching and proofing orders and picking tickets, catching mistakes before they cause disruption.”

“When you look at his job, how would you describe the longest task he has to perform, longest in terms of time frame?”

Marge thought for a minute. You could see some insight wave across her face. “He gets an advance report every Monday that looks two weeks out for orders and their target ship date. It’s like a rolling two week calendar. Of course, the orders during that week are much more definite, but we want him to be thinking out two weeks.”

“And how far in the future do you think he is working?”

“Oh, no more than one day. If you ask him about tomorrow, you get that deer in the headlights look.”

“Did you ever think about that when you hired him?” I asked.

“No, he had experience as a packer, but not as a supervisor. I never thought it would be that big of a deal to really control what was happening.”

“Marge, don’t feel bad. Most companies underestimate the time span required for success in the job. And if you key in on time span, you can get much more specific about the level of the person you need. Here is the key question. When you look at the job, how would you describe the longest task the person has to perform, longest task in terms of time frame?” -TF

As a young project manager, Mario had been successful at meeting the deadline and holding profit margins on each of the four projects he completed. Paul, his manager, wanted to give him a promotion, but was gun-shy.

The last project manager Paul promoted had done well on smaller projects, but the responsibilities of longer range projects had overwhelmed him. In the end, Paul had to let him go. It was almost as if the promotion ruined a good junior project manager.

“You don’t test a person’s time span by promoting them,” I said. “Though not impossible, it is very difficult to backtrack a promotion. Instead, test a person’s time span by giving them longer range projects to work on. Only if they are successful, do they get the corner office.

“Don’t promote the person to test them. Test the person to earn the promotion.” -TF

“My team tells me that I don’t follow-up with them often enough, and that is why I am often disappointed,” complained Sherry. We had been talking about her delegation skills.

“How often is –not often enough-?” I ask.

“It seems to be different for different people.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” Sherry paused. “One person can just go longer than another person.”

“Sherry, I want you to think in terms of Time Span. Time Span is the length of time that a person can work into the future without your direction, using their own independent discretionary judgment. And each person on your team has a different time span.

“Here is your exercise. Make a list of your team and beside each name, I want you to guess the length of time that each one can work independently. Your guess will be the first benchmark for how long you leave them to work without follow-up. I want you to keep a log. Once each week, for a month, write down your observations of each team member’s time span. We will get together and talk again.” -TF

Lester has just returned, “That’s it boss, all done, what’s next?”

And with those innocent words, Lester has just defined the time-span for that specific task. Why is the time-span of a task so critical to the definition of that task? It is an attribute often overlooked. Time, hey, it takes what it takes.

For simple tasks, that take less than a day, or even 2-3 days, the importance of time-span is not so critical, but extend the time-span of a task (or a role) out to a week, out to a month, out to three months, and the dynamics become interesting.

What differences are there between a task that takes 3 days to complete and a task that takes 3 months to complete? In one word, predictability. Most of the elements required to complete a 3 day task are known, very specific, very concrete. Some of the elements required to complete a 3 month task may be unknown or may change prior to the completion of the task. This predictability (or unpredictability) is what makes one task more complex than another. “Yeah, so what’s the big deal about that?”

The “big deal” is that time-span, as an indicator for complexity, can become a discrete unit of measure for the complexity of any task. How complex is a task? If you can describe the time-span of the task, you have just described the complexity of the task. The importance of this measurement is that time-span can be described very specifically. I may not know how to specifically measure the “complexity” of a task or project, but using time-span, I can nail it to the wall: This project has a three-month time span with a deadline of February 15.

Questions:

• If I can measure the complexity of a project using time-span, can I select a Project Manager using time-span?
• If I can determine the maximum time-span of a person, can I determine suitability for a role in our company?
• Can I test a person on the basis of time-span , as they grow and mature, to determine capability for more responsibility?

Hint: the answer is yes. —TF