Imagine you just started your fiscal year, you already negotiated your KRA’s KPIs and together submitted proposals and management comes back stating that the targets set are not challenging enough, too conservative, too comfortable.
In fact most operations supervisors including myself do this A LOT. We spend eighty percent of the discussion time justifying what is ATTAINABLE and REALISTIC in the S M A R T goals format rather than pick a number that is better than the last by how many percent and lay plans to achieve them.
In my opinion, targets shouldn’t be a number you pluck from the sky but it shouldn’t be something you already achieved previously. Ofcourse there’s always a black swan lurking in the corner of every quarter but as an experienced operations supervisor or manager we should have all the skills and tools to adapt and navigate by now – unless you are new to the organisation – you need to find a mentor fast.
So I’m writing this to remind myself to a time where I often challenge myself and work plans backwards. I used to imagine what the end of any given situation is like and work the processes and resources step by step backwards. It helps to visualise the requisites and linkage between steps therefore identify which processes essential or not OR which ones I can crash if the need arises.
Operations or Business As Usual (BAU) in my personal opinion is way harder than Projects. There’s just too much scope creep in BAU and you stretch budget to do this new thing and cannot spend on that. Well this is the demotivation monkey in my mind saying all these excuses.
In this world, you either produce results or give reasons.
Because Results is louder than Action in the way that Action is always louder than Words.
Cheers 🥂 MFR