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Guidelines for Effective Decisions
Making the organization more stable requires improving the processes that will permanently address operational problems. Changes will be enterprise wide and it is costly for an organization to do this frequently. Decisions have to be made on what changes to make and management should take note of the best practices on effective decision making.
Relevant stakeholders should be identified and engaged to get their support to the eventual decisions. Their contribution in ideas and insights will also be invaluable. The more time that the stakeholders can be made to invest, the more likely the stronger the support they can give. In our case, the agency owner, managers and senior staff should be involved in the decision-making process. (Mind Tools Editorial Team)
A deeper and wider analysis of the issues should be conducted to pinpoint all aspects of operations that will be affected. Particular concern would be on additional resources and culture building that will be required which only higher management can act on. Risk analysis should also be carried out to foresee future issues. For every solution alternative, these viewpoints should be applied. To optimize the involvement of key stakeholders, group decision making would be the best as commitment would be the strongest in this approach.
Strategies for Short Term Action
The issues raised are all operational issues which upon identifying resolutions lead to an opportunity to streamline operations. There will two aspects to be examined: management coordination and standardizing operations.
For the new procedures addressing the current issues, the objective for the management is to monitor and assess the effectiveness of the measures. On top of that, proactive initiative will also be practiced by sharing more issues as they arise and resolving them by problem solving activities. To provide structure for management coordination, a management committee will be formed that will meet every quarter to identify, analyze and resolve all operational issues that occur in any of the branches. The COO and area managers will form the committee. In every meeting, each manager is free to bring as many of his branch managers and senior staff who he believes can contribute to the meeting. The premise is that any issue is likely to recur in all the other branches and it will take a single view from all branches to form conclusions that will lead to uniform changes among all branches. In between these meetings, managers are encouraged to communicate among themselves to discuss any management concern and raise them during the official meetings. I will recommend to the COO the need to create the staff position of coordinator for quality management who will directly report to him and assist him in all matters of branch operations.
The current time is also the opportunity to start writing and maintaining an operations manual for branch operations. A professional writer will be hired to establish the manual. Under my supervision, he will use all available resources including employees that will aid him in reflecting in the manual all the operational matters of the company. As soon as the format of the manual has been decided and first entries have been written, all employees will receive an email stating the guidance on how to use the manual. The manual will eventually be published and maintained in the company website with access permitted only to the employees of the company and other third parties who can be given access for a limited period. Its contents will describe organization, standards, processes and technologies (Debaise).
Strategies for Long-term Impact
A continuous program for operations quality management will be launched and its purpose enunciated to all employees. In general, the program will oversee the practice of quality in operations where activities will be planned and tracked. With the current size of the company,
The first activity to be established is the practice of the operations audit in every branch. The goal is to measure the level of compliance of branch operations to the tenets of operations manual and recent official announcements regarding standards and processes that are not yet encoded in the manual. The quality coordinator will conduct the audit every year in every branch. The approach is that the coordinator will send a list of resources (documents, data, facilities, people) that needs to be prepared by the branch manager two weeks before the audit. Findings will be related to selected provisions in the operational manual which have been approved by the COO for each year. Conclusions will be presented and explained to the branch manager. Revisions will be set if warranted and an audit report will be sent to the COO for review and action (Thibodeaux).
The second activity will be the quality circle whose objective is to improve quality compared to maintaining it as tasked to the operational audit. The branch manager is tasked to hold monthly meetings with attendees of his choice to brainstorm, select and recommend plans of action for improvements in branch operations. These will be submitted to the quality coordinator for validation and compilation into a monthly report which will be submitted to the COO for his review and action once again.
Works Cited
Mind Tools Editorial Team. "How to Make Decisions". MindTools, n.d. Web. 5 September 2016. <https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_00.htm>.
Debaise, Colleen. "How to Write an Operations Manual". The Wall Street Journal, 7 Dec. 2009. Web. 5 September 2016. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704342404574576320200075450>.
Thibodeaux, Wanda. "What Is an Operational Audit Process?". Chron Small Business, n.d. Web. 5 September 2016. <http://smallbusiness.chron.com/operational-audit-process-24707.html>.
