Misery Arrus is the supervisor for the word processing center of Tafttronics whi
ID: 424112 • Letter: M
Question
Misery Arrus is the supervisor for the word processing center of Tafttronics which incorporates nine word processors. Various reports, documents, correspondence, and all the photocopying for the company make up most of the work done here. Misery has just gotten out of a meeting with her supervisor who has asked her to identify five key performance areas in her department that will have a significant impact on performance. After this meeting, Misery lamented: “I understand how sales groups can have performance objectives, but I do not see where we can have such things. What am I supposed to come up with? Something like ‘We will process 10,000 pages in the next year’ or ‘at least 99.5 % percent of our pages will be error free? This whole thing seems like ‘wheel spinning’ to me. My group knows their objectives without this planning thing. We plan on doing a good job for all the departments as quickly as possible.”
Please take time to answer these questions and “commiserate with Misery.”
1. What do you think about Misery’s point of view on planning being nothing more than “wheel spinning”?
2. What are some of the key performance areas she could identify in her department?
3. How does her last thought meet the criteria in the text setting objectives?
4. If you were her supervisor, how might you work with Misery to help her?
Explanation / Answer
1. I will not agree what misery has to say about planning because not only in sales, planning is very much important in any field of business even in production or manufacturing as well. There is no way a business or a business process can be successful without planning.
2. The key performance areas that she could identify in her department are:
a. Quality of the product that is to be delivered.
b. The precision and efficiency of the product designed.
c. Production target based on quantity
3. Her last thought that is the planning for doing a good job for all the departments quickly needs to be changed, instead she could focus on one unit and make products better and in order to do that she can have a meeting with the management and see if the management approves her approach.
4. As her supevisior I would have focussed on delivering quality products to a dedicated unit and in order to maintain the quality, a quality and assurance team needs to certify based on the defined quality standards which will make the products defect free and acceptable by the client.