Between meetings, you need to make sure that you apply effective monitoring controls to constantly check the key aspects of your work. If you don’t have such thorough controls and procedures in place, you won’t know where you are or whether the decisions made at a meeting are being implemented successfully.
We can use the example of a project to illustrate such checks. In a project, you need to monitor closely:
▪ Time
▪ Is the work proceeding according to the agreed schedule or are you running late?
▪ If you can see that the project is running late, then contact other colleagues to help work on the project to get it back on track.
▪ Check your timings against the original agreed schedule and note and explain any variations from that schedule.
▪ Beware ‘scope creep’, a series of small gradual changes that together cause delay to a project.
▪ Cost
▪ Is your expenditure under control, or is it unrestricted?
▪ Is your income on track according to your forecasts?
▪ Check all your figures against your projected budget and note and explain any variations from the budget.
▪ Check your actual cash flow, i.e. that you have sufficient funds available to make the payments that have been agreed.
▪ Develop a procurement policy (procedures in your company or organization to buy goods and services), in which colleagues have authority to spend up to a certain amount without checking with their boss.
▪ Make sure that costs are allocated to certain specified cost centres to keep track of the costs incurred.
▪ Quality
▪ Is what you are producing, whether it is a physical product or a service, at the required quality?
▪ Of the three key items, time, cost and quality, quality is the most difficult to measure. However, because it is difficult to quantify, you need to work especially hard at quality controls, i.e. objective criteria that will measure quality.
▪ If your product isn’t at the desired quality, outside companies may turn away from you to your competitors to fulfil their requirements.
Time, cost, quality: which do you need to deal with more effectively?