What is a management system?

A ‘management system’ consists of the totality of structures, functions, processes and mechanisms provided by the organisation as a whole, that enables managers to carry out their work successfully. Depending on its overall maturity, a typical management system will:

Identify the strategic purpose of individual assignments:

• Translate corporate purposes, goals and objectives into assignment purposes, goals and objectives.
• Provide strategic, process, technical and work environment planning.
• Assignment definition and validation processes.
• Define the relationship between the manager’s work and the company strategies, including an organisational structure, communications networks, shared information and decision-making processes, and so on.

Define the processes needed to carry out an individual assignment:

• Define management’s authority and responsibilities.
• Define a range of generic methodologies for executing processes of different kinds.
• Define the detailed functions and tasks needed to carry out a process.
• Provide a range of options and alternatives within any single process, and supply the methods and tools you need to choose between them.

Provide the technical resources and materials needed to carry out any assignment:

• Skilled people.
• Tools and systems (production lines, computer-assisted development tools, test tools).
• ‘Delivery vehicles’ (such as templates) for common technical activities.
• Technical support (R&D, configuration management, standards, tools development, etc.).

Create a working environment that actively supports the assignment:

• Support services (recruitment, training, repositories, tools development, coaching and mentoring, etc.).
• Administrative services (clerical support, data management, record management, standards, analysis and reporting tools, etc.).
• Work facilities and infrastructure (space, hygiene, communications, clerical materials, etc.).
• Storage for interim products (filing, configuration management, etc.).
• Processes and mechanisms for reassigning the assignment’s facilities once the assignment is complete.

Create and manage generic standards and procedures:

• Establish and maintain management methods, tools and techniques.
• Reference metrics.
• Create common and generic work facilities.
• Create support organisations.
• Define the manager’s relationship to stakeholders and regulatory authorities.
• Define the manager’s relationship to third parties such as contractors, suppliers and consultants.

Looks like a checklist to me...

Another way of defining the ideal management system is to take the shortcomings of many existing systems, as described above, and see what would have to be done to remedy them Here is an initial list:

Unnecessary fire-fighting would be eliminated if each management task or function was defined and effectively implemented. Among these tasks would be that of constructing new tasks as circumstances require. The definition of any given task might include (amongst other things):

• Task-specific objectives.
• The steps that are needed to carry it out.
• Defined inputs and outputs.
• Parameters for adapting it to different types of assignment.
• Supporting standards and procedures.
• The methods, tools, techniques, skilled resources needed to execute it efficiently.

These management tasks would be integrated into single whole, thus creating a management system properly so called.

• That system would incorporate (again, amongst other things) clear task interfaces and a fully mapped flow of information and decisions connecting the start and end points of any given assignment.
• Such a system would not only translate organisational goals into assignment requirements, management processes, technical resources and administrative functions …
• …but also provide early warning systems that trigger realistic and appropriate action, before adverse trends and risks turn into crises.

An ideal management system would also be adaptable to the demands of individual assignments. Very many current management practice already include quality plans to deal with this situation, but a more sophisticated system would be truly systematic:

• It would define parameters and tools managers would need to configure the system to meet each assignment’s unique objectives.
• It would be based on business objectives, the assignment’s critical success factors and its intended business purpose (product/service quality, operating costs, time-to-market, etc).
• It would match system components dynamically, to each assignment’s functional needs, not statically and according to the formal management system’s structure.

The performance and outcomes of individual assignments would be recorded in reusable formats, from which other assignments could benefit.

• This would require global repositories for organising and distributing key timely and reliable information and decisions, accredited subject matter experts and information mining tools.
• Such an approach would also allow multiple assignments to be integrated into completely work programmes.
• And of course, you would have to structure assignments in appropriately flexible and multi-dimensional terms in the first place – otherwise dismantling them for reuse would become a major project in its own right.

Out of such a system and the experience that it generates is abstracted and systematised a comprehensive model of all the factors and forces affecting the organisation, and a system for their management and further development. Such a structure would allow management to be as precise as it needs to be (with any degree of precision being attainable), would look forward and backwards over any strategically meaningful timescale, would structure any degree of internal and external complexity and change into simple, manageable terms, and could deal with any meaningful and credible future scenario. Thus, it would enable the organisation to exercise genuine industry leadership, capable not only of ensuring the organisation’s attainment of its current strategic goals but also of achieving the ultimate strategic objective, namely control over the environment in which the organisation operates.

Of course, even the most sophisticated a management system alone cannot create the vision needed to see where an organisation should be going, but the kind of system that is described above would surely be able to integrate complexly interacting strategies, goals, processes, systems, and so turn any rational vision into reality.

Few organisations really provide such a system, so managers as seldom as efficient or effective as they could be. On the other hand, the lack of such a system means that both individual managers and entire organisations operate in a half-light of inefficiently, assumption, politics, ad hoc adjustment and barely concealed crisis management. Internal propaganda levels are high, but real expectations are low.