A friend recently confided in me that he had a new Regional Manager to report to. His company is a national distributor of industrial supplies sold mainly to manufacturing companies. He didn’t know much about his new boss, other than that he suddenly wanted to monitor all sales activity in every office in the southeast, of which there are several. To do this, he asked the sales force to email him directly with all his daily contact lists with customers and sales transactions for the day. In other words, the Regional Manager was interceding and conducting the analysis that local Sales Managers normally do. The Regional Manager went one step further and began to contact the sales force directly rather than through the Sales Managers. Translation: The Regional Manager had embarked on a micromanagement program rather than letting the local Sales Managers do their job.
This made me think about how the Regional Manager was doing with his work and the systems that supported it. When specifying the information requirements for a company, you need to consider the types of actions and decisions to be supported, which can be classified by PCO, that is, Policy-Control-Operational. Within any business, there are three critical levels of business functions that must be supported:
* Policy information – used by top management to run the business and includes items such as operational summaries, forecasts, and trend analysis.
* Control information: used by middle management to control operations and inform executives; this generally includes status reports, departmental summaries, quota analysis, and schedules.
* Operational information – Used to support daily business activities such as placing and processing orders, checking order status, and a host of other activities to assist customers.
Information also has the nuance of being time dependent to perform the various business functions in a timely manner. Not surprisingly, a business requires a faster response at the operational level than at the higher levels. To illustrate:
* Operational information is generally required “on demand” (also known as “on demand”) or daily. Ultimately, this represents the basic transactions of the business to collect data. The daily information is also useful for things such as summaries at the end of the day and for formulating daily schedules.
* Control information generally consists of daily, weekly and monthly summaries so that middle management can monitor operations. Random “On Demand” queries may occur periodically, but are not usually part of the normal routine for middle managers.
* Policy information typically includes weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual summaries and projections required for long-term planning. Again, “On Demand” random inquiries can be performed periodically, but are not usually part of the normal routine of executive management.
If a manager spends an inordinate amount of time processing “on demand”, as my friend’s new boss seems to be doing, it means a couple of things: First, in all likelihood, the manager is not delegating responsibility properly and has established his area of the company on a micromanagement path. Second, it means that the company’s information systems do not serve the business adequately or that the new Regional Manager simply does not know how to use it and is instead trying to reinvent the wheel by devising his own system to obtain the information. If the latter, you may be working at odds with the company’s IT department, thereby introducing redundant data and processes that can lead to conflicting results (also known as “dirty data”). In my friend’s case, I suspect the Regional Manager is guilty of all of the above.
There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to get the right information to support the business functions you are tasked with, but if this raises employee morale problems or invalid information, you need to ask yourself if the wrong person is running the program.
Managers must do an examination of conscience; Do they really need that information or are they interfering with the responsibilities of others? My advice to managers is simple: delegate responsibility, hold people accountable, and get out of their way. “Manage more, supervise less” – Bryce’s Law
Keep faith!