Organisation

"It requires a very unusual mind to make an analysis of the obvious." [Alfred North Whitehead]

Here you can find some comments on organisation and project management.

Operational and organisational structure plays an important role in business. For each business there are certain peculiarities of hierarchy and workflow management. Make sure that you have access to key experience and keep in mind that mid-level management tends to create burocracy. More employees mean more power and influence to them.

Define the key processes of your business and make them lean and effective. Think about minimizing waiting time for retail customers and minimizing throughput time of paperwork, for example.

Organize the work in tasks and distribute them to your people. In a normal organisation you should have two persons who can execute each given task. If you invest some little thought about the value of each task you are able to create a small but instructive organisational framework:

[12 KB Excel file, open and use at your own risk, please read disclaimer]

Define an information structure plan. That means: Let EVERYBODY know where and how (name & format) to store paper and electronic files. Make sure that paper folders and structure of directories on your network are identical.

A rough example for a folder structure [which still has huge parts to be translated from German into English]:

[25 KB MS Word file, open and use at your own risk, please read my disclaimer]

Keep in mind that you can use colours to be able to see at once to which category a folder belongs. Store documents if and only if a process or state is finalized/stable. Write storage category on document. For files: Naming convention could be YYMMDD_CreatorInitials_Number_SelfexplainingTitle.Suffix, for example: 040530_PB_05_Guide_to_store_papers.doc.