Thursday, July 29, 2004
Shared Responsibility
As a part in our job, we are supposed to provide specialist advice for project managers who prepare documents to procure and manage a service. This function is necessary to ensure that the process adopted and the outcome is consistent with the organisation’s policy and complying with the procedures. Our function is to add value to their work as oppose to policing their work. One of the vital steps to achieve this is to review the draft documents before they are finalised.
Somehow, people took advantage of this situation. Some project managers couldn’t care less and spend little effort in preparing their documents. Draft documents are sometimes so brief to the extent of next to nothing. It is virtually impossible to review a very badly formatted document with hardly any content in it. This makes reviewing of the document meaningless and a mockery. Unfortunately, this is a large bureaucratic organisation and there is really nothing much you can penalise the culprit who performed in such tardy manner.
Tardiness is a human weakness. The weakness is best amplified when shared responsibility exists. As long as the responsibility for producing a good work (in this case a good document) is shared by a few people, some people tend to be lazy and pass the buck. Eventually, some other conscientious people in the group will have to work harder to make it good.The concept of Share Responsibility is meant to encourage effective contribution from individual to form an effective team to achieve a quality outcome. In Share Responsibility, everybody is accountable for any failure. Now in large bureaucratic organisation, it is used a screen to hide oneself for not acting in a responsible manner. It is the duty of top management to investigate, to go behind this screen to know the true value of the organisation. Again, often too unfortunately, top management are busy themselves erecting bigger screens to protect themselves and have little time left to do any thing that adds value.
Somehow, people took advantage of this situation. Some project managers couldn’t care less and spend little effort in preparing their documents. Draft documents are sometimes so brief to the extent of next to nothing. It is virtually impossible to review a very badly formatted document with hardly any content in it. This makes reviewing of the document meaningless and a mockery. Unfortunately, this is a large bureaucratic organisation and there is really nothing much you can penalise the culprit who performed in such tardy manner.
Tardiness is a human weakness. The weakness is best amplified when shared responsibility exists. As long as the responsibility for producing a good work (in this case a good document) is shared by a few people, some people tend to be lazy and pass the buck. Eventually, some other conscientious people in the group will have to work harder to make it good.The concept of Share Responsibility is meant to encourage effective contribution from individual to form an effective team to achieve a quality outcome. In Share Responsibility, everybody is accountable for any failure. Now in large bureaucratic organisation, it is used a screen to hide oneself for not acting in a responsible manner. It is the duty of top management to investigate, to go behind this screen to know the true value of the organisation. Again, often too unfortunately, top management are busy themselves erecting bigger screens to protect themselves and have little time left to do any thing that adds value.
