Current management methods are high risk. The strong reliance on people doing the right thing at the right time is at the core of workplace risks. Yet few managers understand the high levels of risk in doing what they always have done.

If you think about what happens now, you will see what I mean. Usually some form of centralized list of agreed tasks that need to be done to achieve the goal is made. Various milestones and deliverables are used to break the work into manageable chunks. In most cases, managers decide who is responsible to achieve the deliverable.

The next step is to meet with the people doing the work to decide who is doing what, when and with who. This is usually where the risk starts to build. Often the people doing the work are unclear of exactly what they are agreeing to do. They haven't had the time to understand the tasks in the same level of detail as managers. So they agree and hope that everything will come clear as they learn more about how the tasks affect them. This lack of clarity starts the slippery slide into high risk.

People at meetings usually make a record of what they need to do to contribute in a notebook or some other means to aid their memory. Some managers create their own list of meeting actions that are distributed to participants. The risk is rising because there are already many separate lists: the original list of tasks to be done, the manager's list from the meeting, and the participants' lists from the meeting. There is a high likelihood that these lists will not be kept synchronized.

When people are involved in many tasks that contribute to strategies, governance, projects, and operations they will have many lists with many things to do. For important tasks to be done, people need to have the time and discipline to manually keep these up to date. Unfortunately this rarely happens in real life. Some people may keep their lists up to date, but I suggest they are in the minority.

Consequently the level of confidence that the work people are actually doing in the workplace is directly contributing to the list of central tasks is uncertain at best. This is a huge risk for management, yet it is the norm.

Many managers try to mitigate this risk by intensively managing what people are doing. This may be achievable in one project, but it is extremely difficult when even a small number of diverse tasks are involved.

The biggest problems from intensively managing work are: a lot of time is required, progress checking and reporting take time away from real work, both managers and workers get stressed, there is little time for value adding leadership tasks, accountability is difficult to manage, and work flows are constantly interrupted. Unfortunately this high risk scenario is not far from reality.

TASKey has spent over 10 years developing a simple means to keep lists (task lists and personal ToDo lists) synchronized. Software keep tasks and ToDo lists synchronized in seconds. The web and mobile phones make convenient access to relevant updated lists anywhere, at any time very easy.

There is now an alternative for managers to significantly reduce the current risks in managing work. It requires a combination of smart software, and the web and/or mobile phones. So now managers have a viable solution to significantly reduce the current risks in managing work.

By,

Dr Neil Miller

http://www.taskey.com/