Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp are the authors of Getting it Done. Roger Fisher was a Harvard Professor and a renowned expert on negotiation and he uses all of his expertise and skills in negotiation and applies it to getting work done.
After learning about the three steps to getting it done, I realized there are several mistakes that the authors point out people commonly make when trying to get work done. Avoid these to get the most done:
Spend too much time planning
It’s common to not act without having the perfect plan in place. But you will never have a perfect plan. And even if you do have the perfect plan, when it comes to executing it, the plan will change once you execute and get data.
Acting without planning
Some people feel like because you can’t have the perfect plan, you should just take action and adjust as needed. Except sometimes, you get into doing and you don’t stop to think about whether you are doing the right thing. Should you be doing something else first? Is this the best use of your time?
Not stopping to review
You’ve spent some time planning the right course of action. You started part of the plan. But have you stopped to consider what has happened and why? This is the great part about retrospectives — a project management event where you gather feedback and decide on improvements as a team — you stop every once in a while to consider what went well and what could be improved. The same needs to be done when you are trying to get things done.
Decision-makers are disconnected from the front-line
Another common mistake is to have decision-makers and the people who execute the plan on different teams. One team is ‘strategic’. The other team is ‘tactical’. Unfortunately, the tactical team that executes the plan is closest to the work and therefore, is in the best position to make the next decisions. But usually what happens is the executing team brings the data to management and management makes decisions on what to do next.
This post was created with Typeshare
