Crystal Reports Administration: Handling Work Overload

Day after day, you're inundated with work requests, "firefighting" activities, and directives from various managers. On top of that, you've got project work that is routinely slipping the schedule.

You've asked for some funding to outsource a few things to clear up the backlog but have been told no. You've tried turning down some of the demands on your time, only to find the political costs a bit more than you're comfortable paying. You've tried working longer hours, but found that leads to more mistakes and doesn't set well with what little personal life you've managed to squeeze into your schedule.

What can you do? It all seems so hopeless. Btu it's not. In fact, a few simple techniques can work wonders. The following tips will put you in charge of your work, rather than the other way around.

Let's look at the three top level tips, for starters.

1. Monetize. Time is money. When some manager directs you to do X, determine the cost of X and how much X contributes to the company's bottom line. If the number doesn't look worthwhile, ask the manager to justify the work. And remember, you don't work for everyone. You report to your boss. Keep your boss informed about how well you are managing your time and what ROI there is for the company. Wasting time just to please a vocal manager doesn't produce any resume bullet points.
    
2. Prioritize. Do the most important things first. These are not necessarily the things that are easiest or most enjoyable. They aren't even the things that are most urgent, in most cases. Talk candidly with your boss about what his/her priorities are. Then, make those your priorities.
   
   If your internal customers disagree, talk with them to get their reasoning as to why--don't argue and don't agree to anything. Take your findings to your boss and ask if priorities need to change.
   
   One note on priorities--they mean that some items might never get done. So be it.
    
3. Organize. How well are you set up to do your job efficiently? If you are forgetting tasks or are late with them, use a calendar program. If your e-mail inbox is overflowing, create folders and manage e-mails as though they were paper files going into a steel cabinet.

Here are some other tips, in no particular order:

• Use your calendar tool to get distracting activities off your mind. Once you make an appointment to deal with a given activity, forget about it and focus on what's at hand.
   
• Don't agree to do any new work until you know the resources needed to do it. Many people, eager to please, agree to something that seems easy enough but then find themselves hopelessly mired in trying to get that work off their back.
   
• Automate. Our customers who use our automated schedulers, for example, free up time for productive work. Look for ways to automate manual tasks, especially repetitive ones.
   
• Eliminate unnecessary steps. Review your work processes and look for steps you can eliminate. Most people are shocked at how much time they can reclaim by pruning their processes.
   
• Reduce meetings. The biggest timewaster in nearly any organization is the dreaded meeting. Find ways to bow out of meetings that don't particularly matter to the mission of your department. For other meetings, encourage the folks who call those meetings to provide an advance agenda. Bonus tip: send them a note about Microsoft Word's Agenda Wizard or ask them to specify how long each agenda item will take.
   
• Manage up. If your boss is one of those managers who can't say no to others and the result is a %*# load of high-priority work for you, stop. Make a list of all of those tasks and ask your boss to identify the most important one. Then, ask your boss to identify the second most important one. If you simply asked your boss to prioritize, you'd get a useless response. But using this approach, you force your boss to choose. Once your boss chooses, ignore the other tasks on the list until you have knocked out the two most important ones. Then, repeat the process. Eventually, your boss may come to understand that you can't do everything at once.
   
• Manage down. If you have subordinates, don't make the mistake made by most managers. That mistake is assigning a few tasks and then waiting for subordinates to let you know when they are done. This doesn't instill a sense of urgency or efficiency in them, and it encourages milking the job.
  
  Instead, assign a completion time to each one. This sets expectations, and it spurs people into working efficiently. Make your quality expectations clear, though. You don't want people to take shortcuts to meet a target date, only to turn in substandard work. If someone can't meet a target date, be flexible and reasonable about it. Ask what the problems were, and determine if that date was reasonable or not. Look for ways to prevent a recurrence--either by working more efficiently or by allowing more time.
   
• Manage across. Don't let your peers heap work on you, pass the buck, or direct your subordinates. In the contest to snare the promotion that will eventually come, some people are deliberately parasitical to their coworkers. By getting you to carry part of their load (with little or no reciprocation), they bolster their chances of becoming your boss. Do you really want to work for such a person?
  
  Other people just naturally leech off others. They have adopted this as their natural working style.
  
  Be careful to discern between parasites and those for whom teamwork has real meaning. For example, you may have a coworker who is a math idiot and routinely asks you to correct his spreadsheets. But that same coworker does things for you without even being asked. Like that time when you were being blamed for the loss of a six-figure sale while not there to defend yourself and your coworker set the record straight.
   
• Manage the white spaces. On every organizational chart, you see lines connecting various job titles and departments. These are supposedly lines of authority, lines of responsibility, lines of communication, etc. But what about those boxes that don't have any lines running between them? They have only white space between them. Manage that space, and you open for yourself a huge sphere of influence and resources within your company.
  
  For example, you're in IT and there's no line between your department and Purchasing. The manager of the Purchasing Department casually mentions that half a dozen orders got dumped this morning when the power flickered. You offer to look at the situation and come up with a solution. The next day, you explain that a $99 point of use battery backup unit solves that problem and you offer to order one and set it up.
  
  Six months down the road, you are preparing a capital request that you desperately want approved. Can you think of a person who might provide valuable insight on how to make that request more likely to be approved?
   
• Constantly improve. Toyota made its reputation not by solving one or two big problems, but by solving thousands of little problems that added up. If something isn't quite right, fix it. Constantly look for ways to make your job more efficient, to reduce rework, and to improve quality. Look for ways that your internal customers can do the same. For example, do you have a work request form? What items can you eliminate from that form?
   
• Constantly learn. Are you buying books related to your core area of responsibility? Are you subscribing to the professional journals or trade publications related to your work? Are you taking vendor classes or any other courses that expose you to the recommended methods and best practices?
   
• Network. Other people discover new and better ways of doing things. Get involved in your professional associations and learn what others are doing. Go to conferences and seminars. It may seem like you don't have time to do these things, but that's looking at the situation in reverse.

This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.