Defining processes
Author: Paul Tansom
I’ve been clearing a few things out of the study over the past few days, well study may be a bit of a grand name for it, but I tend to use it rather than office. There’s two reasons for that, firstly there’s the fact that I can’t have a dedicated office for work at home otherwise it is liable for business taxes. Secondly there’s the practical reason that it hasn’t always been an office and isn’t really one now – there’s way too many non-work bits in there. Books of all sorts (sailing, photography, cetaceans, fiction, etc., not just computing), and lots of old retro computing bits (more magazines as well as the machines and software).
Anyway, the reason I started this post was that I came across a couple of pieces that I wrote in response to the management processes in use where I was working a few years back and thought I would immortalise them here for safe keeping! The first two are my own work and the third claims a much older author 
TIME MANAGEMENT – The process of spending all your time planning what you would do if you weren’t so busy planning. A particularly impractical process since priorities have usually changed before the plan is finished, rendering it obsolete and requiring a new one – Paul Tansom, 1996
PROCESS – A set of rules/instructions that, if followed, render any task too complicated and time consuming to meet the business need. An efficient employee will totally ignore most processes, but be sufficiently articulate to explain how their work fits into any random process explained to them in time of crisis – Paul Tansom, 1996
REORGANISATION – We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation – C Petronius AD67
Tags: office, process, reorganisation, time management
