Understanding management: I'm managing thank you!

# 2.2 Applying the transformation process

To start managing your own work, it is important to develop an understanding of the different tasks and activities involved. This enables us to identify where we can make improvements in efficiency and how we can improve our effectiveness. The next activity asks you to analyse a small part of the work you do using the idea of the transformation model.

## Activity 1

0h 10m

Think of a simple job or task you do routinely either at work or at home. You need to choose one which is not too complicated. Draw a transformation model diagram, like the one in Figure 3, to analyse the job or task. Label clearly the following:

1. the inputs (don't forget your own efforts)

2. the sub-processes involved in transformation, and

3. the outputs.

## Discussion

Now put your diagram aside in a safe place. We will return to it in Activity 2.

Even having analysed a task to this degree of detail, there may be more to it than meets the eye. If you are the consumer of the sandwich, it is very likely that you will only make (and eat) one or two before your hunger is satisfied. If you are catering for a large group or running a lunchtime sandwich making business, you have to produce a large number of sandwiches, often in quite a short timescale. You may well employ your staff or volunteers in specialist roles: one person will butter the bread, another will grate the cheese, another will prepare the salad and another (if you have that many) will assemble the final sandwich, not forgetting to package and store them appropriately so they stay fresh until eaten. This specialisation of job roles to deal with sub-processes, known as task specialisation, should save you some time or at least make sure the required volume is delivered at the appropriate time. In other words, it should improve the efficiency of the process so that higher volumes of inputs can be transformed into higher levels of outputs in a relatively short time. Certainly that is what Taylor and his scientific management followers believed.

However, there still remains a potential difficulty. What if no one wants to eat a cheese salad sandwich on brown bread? It is a common source of irritation, I suspect, to those of us who make lunchtime sandwiches for other members of our families to find them uneaten at the end of the day. For a sandwich making business, however, unsold sandwiches are an expensive waste of their inputs. They have been efficient enough to produce the required number of sandwiches, in the time given, to satisfy their consumers’ hunger. Unfortunately, the consumers themselves do not feel satisfied with what is being offered. In other words, while they have been efficient, they have not necessarily been effective in satisfying their consumer. Hence, for many businesses and organisations nowadays, it is important they gain an understanding of their customers’ or users’ needs when planning the production of their outputs. And even for employees, the needs of their managers and colleagues must be borne in mind as the internal customers of their work output. Their effectiveness can then be judged in terms of the satisfied needs of the customer or user, not just the end product.

In Activity 1, did you remember to put in your own time, efforts and skills as inputs, as we advised? What about the inputs of other people? In many jobs and tasks, particularly in management, it is these human resource inputs which are vital to the transforming activities. For now, though, let us try to identify the other categories of input and output. Did you, for example, use any tools or equipment in your task? Or did you mix or assemble any components or ingredients, as we did in our sandwich example? These are known as physical resource inputs. This leaves us with the question of who pays for the physical and human resources and how. It may be your employing organisation who pays, the business you run, or from your own pocket. Whoever it is, the money must be found, and this represents the financial resource input.

OpenLearn - Understanding management: I'm managing thank you!
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