Challenges facing Management
point home beautifully. Over half of the activities managers performed lasted less than 9 minutes before they were interrupted; only 10% lasted more than 30 minutes; desk work averages 15 minutes before interruption; the only tasks they ever spent more than one hour without interruption were planned meetings. The term constant interruption was coined to describe the nature of the manager's day. This suggests that this has become more of a facet of managerial work today: more interruptions, more fragmentation.
Two features characterise the fragmentation: variety and reaction. Mintzberg [3] put it best: "the significant activity is interspersed with the trivial in no particular pattern". This means that managers are required to constantly shift from one topic to another; to make decisions quickly and to deal with issues when they arise. Most of the manager's contacts with other people are ad-hoc -- only a minority are scheduled. Unscheduled contacts are generally brief and can cover a wide range of different issues -- often in a short conversation. The manager is often expected to deal with issues on the spot -- reacting to the situation as it arises.
Management is characterised by long hours, multiple, conflicting demands and so forth. Hales [4] puts it nicely: "There is considerable evidence that whatever managers do, their activities do not form a neat, coherent, unproblematic set. Activities may be competing, even contradictory, and this itself produces the important managerial work of compromise and negotiation.”
I found that because of this fragmentation, planning projects and seeing them through is becoming more difficult, affecting how my colleagues perceive how I am managing my time.
Management is Informational
Some people have presented management as being entirely about processing information. Managers deal with huge quantities of information, process it, use it, disseminate it and otherwise deal with it.
There are good reasons for this. Information systems tend to lag too far behind what is happening (I've worked on real-time information systems, and these were far too slow for real-time decision making). A manager -- especially a good manager -- is going to be ahead of anywhere an information system can be. Knowledge Management (KM), and the decision support systems that precursored KM, are effective when they recognise this fact. Information systems tell you what has happened. By the time it happens, and the information gets into the system, it may be too late to do anything about it. These systems are important, but quite often as monitoring and control devices, rather than as central decision making tools. This is where the ‘human’ side of management can score heavily in decision-making.
The preference for oral information is critical: it allows for instant feedback (and often, instant action), probing, and teasing. It allows the manager to follow a thread and (by doing so) reduce both ambiguity and uncertainty. As well as gathering, processing and acting on information, the manager often directs the flow of information in their organisation.
Management is Active
Finally, managers do. Again, Hales [4] gives a nice description of this: "The manager is less a slow [next page]