Management Time; who’s got the Monkey?

Management Time; who’s got the Monkey? An analogy that underscores the value of assigning, delegating and controlling.
By William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L.Wass.

This article was originally published in the November–December issue of HBR in 1974 and republished in HBR in 1999.This has been one of the publication’s two best-selling reprints ever. This article explores the meaning of management time as it relates to the interaction between the manager and his boss, his own peers, and his subordinates and suggests what a manager should do to have better control over his time. I have given the article abstract here.

The authors define the Time available to a Manager as “Management Time” and split this time into Boss-Imposed Time, System-Imposed Time, and Self-Imposed Time. The definitions are as given below.

• Boss-Imposed Time to accomplish the activities which the boss requires and which the manager cannot disregard without swift penalty.
• System-Imposed Time to accommodate those requests to the manager for active support from his peers. This should be catered to or else there will be penalties, though not swift.
• Self-Imposed Time to do those things which the manager originates or agrees to do himself. A certain portion of this time, however will be taken by the subordinates and “is called subordinate-imposed time.” Self-Imposed time is not subject to penalty since neither the boss nor the system can discipline the manager for not doing what they did not know he had intended to do in the first place

The basics of time management necessitates that a manager get control over the timing and content of what he/she does. The first two ‘Times’ can’t be disregarded and will incur penalties of various degrees. So the only ‘time’ a manager has got under his control is the Self-Imposed Time. The manager’s strategy is therefore to increase the ‘discretionary’ component of this self-imposed time by minimizing or doing away with the ‘subordinate’ component. He should use the added increment to get better control over his boss-imposed and system-imposed activities. This is because Most Managers spend much more subordinate imposed time than they even faintly realize.

The Anatomy of Managerial Initiative

There are five degrees of Initiative that a manager can exercise in relation to the boss and to the system.

• Wait until told ( lowest level)
• Ask what to do
• Recommend, then take resulting action
• Act, but advise at once
• Act on own, then routinely report ( highest initiative)

Clearly the manager should be professional enough not to indulge himself in initiatives #1 and #2 in relation to either boss or the system A manager who uses initiative #1 has no control over either the timing or content of his boss-imposed or system-imposed time. He thereby forfeits any right to complain about what he is told to do or when he is told to do it. The manager who uses #2 has control over the timing, but not over the content. Initiatives #3, #4 and #5 leave the manager in control of both, with the greatest control being at level #5.

The manager’s job, in relation to his subordinates’ initiatives, is twofold; first, to outlaw the use of initiative #1 and #2, thus giving his subordinates no choice but to learn and master “Completed Staff Work”, then, to see that for each problem leaving his office, there is an agreed upon level of initiative assigned to it, in addition to the agreed upon time and place for the next manager subordinate conference.

Where is the Monkey?
Let us imagine that a manager is walking down the hall and that he notices one of his subordinates, Mr. A, coming up the hallway. When they are abreast of one another, Mr. A greets the manager with, “Good Morning, By the way, we’ve got a problem. You see…”. As Mr. A continues, the manager recognizes in this problem the same two characteristics common to all the problems his subordinates gratuitously bring to his attention. Namely the manager knows (a) enough to get involved, but (b) not enough to make the on-the-spot decision expected of his. Eventually the manager says, “So glad you brought this up. I’m in a rush now. Meanwhile, let me think about it and I will let you know.” Then he and Mr. A part company.

Let us analyze this. Before the two met, the monkey was on the back of the subordinate. After the two met, it had jumped on to the manager’s back. Subordinate imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully executes a leap from the back of a subordinate to the back of the superior and does not end until the monkey is returned to its proper owner for care and feeding.
For a manager who doesn’t know how to handle the events like the above, such an event will happen many times in a day. The authors use a Monkey-on-the-back analogy to examine how subordinate-imposed time comes into being and what the manager can do about it. Here Monkey refers to a Problem or issue, faced by a subordinate working under a manager. In doing so, the authors suggest the law of Monkey Management.

“At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will our problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you will no longer have a problem. I cannot help a man who hasn’t got a problem. You may ask for help at any appointed time and we will make a joint determination on the next move. In those rare instances where the move turns out to be mine, you and I will determine together. I will not make any move alone and all the time, the ownership to solve the problem remains with you.”

The authors also suggest five rules in assigning and controlling issues.
Monkeys should be fed or shot: Problems should be quickly solved or steps taken in the right direction to solve them. Otherwise, the manager will waste valuable time on postmortem or attempted resurrections.
The monkey population should be kept below a maximum: This number should be below the time available for the manager time to feed the monkeys.
Monkeys should be fed by appointment only: The manager should not have to be hunting down starving monkeys and feeding them on a catch-as-catch-can basis.
Monkeys should be fed face to face or by telephone, but never by mail: if by mail, the next move will be the manager’s – remember? Documentation may add to the feeding process, but it cannot take the place of feeding.
Every monkey should have an assigned “next feeding time” and “degree of initiative”: These can be modified by mutual consent, but never allowed to become vague or indefinite. Otherwise the monkey may starve to death. (Refer #1)

• By doing the above, the manager actually can actually do the following
  Increase his discretionary time, by eliminating subordinate-imposed time.
• Use a portion of his new found discretionary time to see to it that each of his subordinates possess enough initiative, without which he can’t exercise initiative, and then to see to it that the initiative is in fact taken.
• Use another portion of his increased discretionary time to get and keep control of the timing and content of both boss-imposed and system-imposed time.

The result of all this is that the manager will increase his leverage, which will in turn enable him to multiply without theoretical limit, the value of each hour that he spends in managing ‘management time’.

An Integrated List of Predictors for Project Managers

Given below is a list of Predictors for people who are seriously interested in pursuing Project Management as a career option. I read this in the book “Leadership Skills for Project Managers” by Jeffrey K. Pinto and Jeffrey W. Trailer (eds.). It is a slightly long list, but be assured that it is worth the time.
The first set, "Problem Solving" is a logical result of three predictors, ranging from problem analysis to decision-making. The predictor, "Problem Analysis," deals with a person's ability to handle information; it is the most closely related to her mental and intellectual potential. The predictor, "Judgment and Practical Sense," based largely on the candidate's experience, refers to the actual content of the solutions or decisions proposed. Finally, "Decisiveness" represents the tendency to make decisions or apply solutions, regardless of their quality.
The second set, "Administration" brings together what are usually known as management skills ("Planning and Organization" and "Control"), political aspects ("Strategy and Organizational Know-How"), and technical aspects ("Specialized Knowledge") of management.
The third set contains the main predictors relating to "Supervision and Project Team Management" The first four predictors are concerned with the manager's behavior toward individual team members, and the other two, with management of the team as a whole.
The fourth set is composed of basic general skills in "Interpersonal Relations"
The last set, "Other Personal Qualities" lumps together various other personal characteristics.

Problem Solving
1.Problem Analysis

• Mental and conceptual abilities
• Ability to deal quickly with large quantities of information
• Identify significant problems
• Look beyond symptoms to find the cause
• Gather and analyze data that are essential to make a diagnosis
• Develop all possible solutions and their consequences

2.Judgment and Practical Sense

• Choose wisely among possible solutions
• Make decisions and apply solutions that take into account the constraints of the project and its environment
• Always bear in mind the overall perspective of the project and not just one of its facets; concentrate on the problem as a whole
• Decisiveness
• Propensity to make decisions
• Committed to decisions, even in difficult or delicate situations where the consequences could be personally unpleasant
• Set up a concrete strategy for implementing the decision (action planning, delegating responsibilities, fixing objectives, follow-up mechanisms and assessing results)

Administration
3.Planning and Organization

• Identify objectives and priorities
• Establish work timetables
• Organize resources to achieve the objectives
• Define tasks and work methods

4.Control

• Maintain everyday activities in line with objectives and project deadlines
• Ensure follow-up and make corrections if necessary
• Follow budgets and exercise financial control

5.Strategy and Organizational Know-How

• Take steps to be well informed
• Build formal and informal collaboration networks
• Know who to talk to outside the team or service when necessary
• Know the organization and its operation
• Ability to work in harmony with the organization's political reality
• Ability to implicate others to reach objectives

6.Specialized Knowledge

• Know the information, principles, theories, and techniques that are useful for the various tasks to be done
• This knowledge can be related to management (planning and control tools, accounting, finance, contracts, decision-making tools, behavioral sciences, and so on), the technology to be used, the product or service offered, the market, production, or marketing

Supervision and Project Team Management

7.Delegation of Responsibilities

• Believe fundamentally in others
• Structure clearly the tasks to be carried out, while leaving enough latitude for initiative on the part of team members
• Delegate responsibility to the appropriate level
• Share part of the responsibility with team members
• Allocate authority and resources to team members to enable them to make significant decisions in their fields of responsibility and competence
• Ability to work with subordinates who are clearly identified as experts in their fields without being either too direct or too deferential

8.Team Structuring

• Structure tasks to be carried out and communicate them clearly (see no. 4, Planning and Organization)
• Ability to use power unilaterally
• Use reinforcement to stimulate team members
• Establish control mechanisms that favor task accomplishment according to objectives and correct them if necessary (see no. 5, Control)

9.Consideration toward Team Members

• Behave kindly toward team members
• Identify their needs and ensure their satisfaction
• Fair

10.Development of Team Members

• Frequently assess the performance of each team member and give him feedback
• Identify training needs of team members on the basis of their present and future tasks
  Set up training strategies and ensure they are carried out
• Demonstrate the importance of training by devoting financial and human resources and personal time to it

11.Teamwork, Flexibility, and Cooperation

• Ability to work as part of a group
• Recognize the circumstances that require teamwork or a team decision
• Maintain a climate that encourages the participation and implication of each team member
  Receptive toward other people's points of view
• Prepared to change own opinion and compromise

12.Resolving Conflicts

• Ability to coordinate specialists from different fields
• Recognize a conflicting situation and resolve it efficiently (see A, Problem Solving)
• Know conflict psychology
• Interpersonal Relations

13.Oral Communication

• Communicate efficiently in exchanges with others
• Make efficient verbal presentations
• Concretize communications in respect to the project

14.Interpersonal Influence, Persuasion, and Negotiation

• Aware of the feelings, needs, and expectations of others
• Conscious of the effect of one's behavior on others
• Ability to influence others toward realizing objectives
• Bring interlocutor around to own point of view while maintaining a good relationship

15.Ascendancy

• Liking for command
• Need to dominate others and not be dominated
• Concerned by one's influence on others

Other Personal Qualities
16.Need to Achieve and be Proactive

• Need to excel, to achieve something unique
• Constant desire to do better, to be the best
• Directed toward action and results
• Dynamism, relentlessness, energy
• Optimism, belief in ability to influence events around oneself

17.Self Confidence, Maturity, and Emotional Stability

• Confidence in self and abilities
• Ready to live with personal consequences of difficult decisions (see No. 3, Decisiveness)
• Emotionally stable and strong
• Able to control emotions
• Short- and long-term resistance to stress

18.Loyalty, Honesty, and Integrity

• Endorse the organization's politics and values
• Place the organization's interests before own
• Respect superiors
• Respect engagements
• Professional and personal integrity

19.Tolerance toward Ambiguity and Openness to Change

• Accept uncertainty and unforeseen circumstances that are inevitable during a project
• Desire to work among more supple organizational structures such as matrical structure or its variants
• Propensity to change plans, approaches, strategies, policies, or practices according to the demands of the situation

20.Interest in the Job

• Intrinsic motivation for the work itself and its different activities
• Hopes and career plan that correspond to the opportunities offered
• Interest in the working conditions (place, timetable, salary, and so on)
  

Quality and Grade

I and a few other colleagues were discussing software quality over lunch. One colleague was talking about an application which has features like displaying the equivalent database field in the browser tab, when the cursor is set on a screen field and mentioned that applications are not usually made to that quality. I told him that he is mixing up quality and grade and that is why he has made this statement. If you want to know the difference between these two terms that should not be interchangeably used, please read on. Take a best selling car like Maruti 800. It doesn’t have lot of features and it doesn’t make lots of promises other than high fuel efficiency and low maintenance cost. It doesn’t have a power window or a tachometer. It has only 800 cc of power and the pick-up is not so great when the AC is on. In older Marutis, you had to switch off the AC to get that extra bit of juice, when you overtake. Compare this to a Mercedes Benz. Feature wise, a Mercedes Benz any day will out do a Maruti 800. So why is everyone calling Maruti 800 a very successful* car? To understand this in detail, we have to define Quality and Grade first.

Let us look at PMBOK’s definition.
Quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements. Stated and Implied needs are the inputs to developing project requirements. A critical element of quality management in the project context is to turn stakeholder needs, wants and expectations into requirements through stakeholder analysis performed during project Scope Management.
Grade is a category assigned to products of services having the same functional use, but different technical characteristics.

Quality and Grade are not the same. Low quality is always a problem; low grade may not be. For example, a software product can be of high quality (no obvious defects, readable manual) and low grade (a limited number of features), or of low quality (many defects, poorly organized user documentation) and high grade (numerous features).

The variants that come in a car are a good example of grade. A Maruti Swift (petrol) comes in three grades. Lxi, Vxi and Zxi. In case of software, Windows Vista comes in 5 different grades, Ultimate, Home Premium, Home basic, Business and Enterprise. Typically higher grade products have more features and cost more to manufacture than lower grades. While it has been easy to get the definition of quality, getting quality requirements right, for a project is not that easy. Let us see why.

Conforming to quality and maintaining the level of Quality is a tricky business. Quality is also in the eye of the buyer or customer—not only the seller. So every application/product tends to have 2 kinds of “Quality Gaps” – the producer (seller) gap and the consumer (buyer) gap.

Producer gap occurs when there is a difference between specification (documented requirements) and what is actually delivered.
Consumer gap occurs because what the customer wanted and what the producer actually delivered are not the same. While whatever mentioned above is universally true, for software, it becomes a little bit more complicated.

• In case of software, the following things tend to happen
• There is a tension between customer quality requirements (efficiency, reliability, etc.) and developer quality requirements (maintainability, reusability, etc.)
• Some quality requirements are difficult to specify in an unambiguous way
• Software specifications are usually incomplete and often inconsistent.

This is the reason why quality management is an integral part of Project Management and an important area of work for a project manager.

The project manager has to arrive at the right level of quality and grade required for a project and ensure that the project output conforms to the same. It is relatively easier to establish grade and conform to it, but managing quality is altogether a different story. In managing quality, the project manager has to manage the consumer gap and producer gap. Consumer gap is the more difficult one to manage since this means knowing what is there in the customer’s mind. Once this gap is covered to a greater extent, working on the producer gap is easier as the target is more tangible.

A Manager has to close the gaps by

• Manage the customer interaction better and set the right expectation to close the consumer gap*.
• Putting in place the right processes that ensure consistency in the delivery to close Producer’s gap

Coming back to the point where we started, why is Maruti 800 a great car? That is because though it has fewer features, it delivers on what it promises to do. So the next time, some one says that a software is of lower quality because it has fewer features, I hope we now know what to say :-)

*Here I am making an implicit assumption that success can't be achieved without quality.
*Closing the consumer gap doesn’t always mean providing to the needs of the customer. It should also be looked upon as setting the right expectation – which in turn leads to a gap that is easier to manage.