Organizational Management Project Management No

¶ … Organizational Management

Project Management

No matter what role you are playing in an organization, allowing fear to play a major part in your decision-making process is never a good idea. On the other hand, fear can also be a useful tool. For project managers, finding the best balance between healthy and unhealthy fear is necessary. Healthy fear is part of what motivates us as leaders. If we were not afraid of something, then we would not lead. For instance, responsible leaders often have a healthy fear of missed deadlines and poor quality work. This fear is enough to motivate them to do quality work and to do it on time. Unhealthy fear, however, is fear that becomes so paramount that project managers cannot function. For instance, a project manager who is nervous about coming to work each day because she is afraid of what other employees will have to say to her or because she is obsessed with the idea of timeliness expresses an unhealthy fear. Project managers who find the right balance will be motivated, but still realistic. In this same vein, project managers often also tap into a kind of fear that is like intuition. For instance, they might feel fearful about making a certain step in a project play or continuing with the project in the midst of uncertainty. This kind of fear can also be helpful to the project manager as it teaches him or her to think in just a moment, making decisions based upon an experienced and well-cultivated sensor for fear. Thus, for the project manager, balancing fear is an important way to deal with uncertainty.

Benchmarking

Every business has to gauge its successes and losses, in addition to comparing itself with others who are in the field. In a competitive environment, managers know that they need to understand these numbers, and to exceed competitors in customer service in order to win this financial war. Still, managers need to be careful regarding how they benchmark. Benchmarking requires its proponents to implement standards and categories in order to begin the benchmarking process. For some companies and some industries, this might be inconvenient and not worth the annoyance. In addition, determining what standards to measure for each company can be a difficult task. For instance, if companies are only measuring using statistics of economic gain, they are leaving out important information about the type of leadership that the organization has, perhaps even some steps for improvement. Knowing what standards should be measured in the benchmarking process, then, is crucial for managers, who must often take up conversations with superiors about whether or not the testing that is being done is relvant. Furthermore, it is also necessary for managers to be careful when interpreting the data for the benchmarking process. Being sure that statistics have been done properly, and remember that correlated variables do not necessarily mean a connection between these variables is crucial. Despite its drawbacks, however, benchmarking is crucial to the future of organizations, but it should be done in a way that encourages managers and reports data scientifically.

Effectiveness