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Abstract
The "Fast, Better, Cheaper" mission of organizations today is driving a continual need for process improvement. Industrial Engineers with their techniques in flow-charting, process charting, work measurement, and simulation have contributed to the revolution in manufacturing efficiency and effectiveness. Increasingly organizations are expecting similar improvements in their management function and asking Industrial Engineers to lead the efforts. Efforts to understand management efficiency and effectiveness use require different techniques. The use of focus groups, interviews, surveys, and self-report data such as time-logs are important data sources. To begin an improvement project requires that the current situation is well understood. This paper is a summary of a study conducted to determine how managers currently spend their time within a specific organization and to identify opportunities for improvement. The paper presents an approach for gather this data that both provides a basis for understanding the current situation and concurrently dis cusses the use of new industrial engineering techniques.
Keywords
Management Work Process, Process Improvement, Time
1. Introduction
This study was conducted within a large city transportation organization. The inception of the study resulted from low results on an employee morale survey. Senior management's desire was to change the climate in the organization and believed that the first step was to understand how managers in the units were spending their time. It was thought that perhaps managers were not spending enough time with employees. The focus of the study was to understand how management spent its time and identify sources of unproductive time that could be eliminated or reduced, in the belief that given more time management will engage in additional positive employee interactions. The study questions were:
Study Question #1:
How does management spend their time?
Study Question #2:
Are there sources of significant unproductive time and/or critical constraints that can be eliminated or reduced?
2. Methodology
Quantifying how managers spend their day is a difficult assignment since many factors influence how the day goes. It was important in this study to analyze multiple managers, use multiple data sources, and study over a long enough period of time to see a pattern. This study used self-report data because ultimately what this study was about was providing input to how managers should change in order to spend...