Order of Operations

In many activities, there is a certain set of steps needed to accomplish an objective, along with an optimal sequence in which to conduct these steps.

Sometimes, the sequencing of the steps does not matter. In other times, the sequence is essential.

Outside of professional project managers, the average person doesn’t think about this topic very much… but should.

If you’re managing a new team, department, or company, there’s a lot of work to be done. It’s useful to understand which work must be done in a particular order (e.g., done serially one after another) and which work can be done concurrently (e.g., in parallel).

If you want to accelerate your time to results, you want to try to organize or re-organize the work in such a way that it can be done in parallel.

This is the key to improving the time to results.

One of the skills new managers, leaders, and executives sometimes have difficulty with is managing people, teams, and projects in which the people reporting to them have more experience and expertise.

The best executives are able to handle this easily. The ones that struggle don’t know how to manage someone who has greater experience than they do.

One way to manage someone that is better than you (in a particular area) is to ask about the steps needed to achieve an outcome and identify which steps truly need to be done in a particular sequence — versus being done in parallel.

In a surprising number of cases, work is done in a particular order due to historical habit, as opposed to it being impossible to do things in parallel.

If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

Even when you do ask and get an answer, ask the other person to explain to you “why.”

“Why does X need to be done before Y? What about X is used as an input into Y? How important is the X component in doing Y? If we exclude X from Y, would Y still be good? If we insert X after the fact into Y, how often does that result in a bad outcome?”

“Why do all financials for all business units need to be done before the audit for the whole company can begin? Is it possible to start the audit of four out of five business units before the fifth business unit’s financials are completed? If we exclude the fifth business unit from the start of the audit and add it later, does that cause a problem? If so, why?”

“Why do we need to wait until all modules of the new software release are checked in before doing a quality assurance performance test? Can we test what we have now? If not, why not? If yes, are there tradeoffs in doing so? If there are tradeoffs, what are they? Can we test what we have now, then test the whole thing once the last few modules are checked in? If no, why not? If yes, what’s the downside?”

Good leaders are often NOT more functionally capable than their direct reports. The Chief Technology Officer’s coding skills are often out of date after being a CTO for a number of years. However, a good CTO knows which questions to ask of direct reports who have greater domain expertise. This pattern is increasingly true as you progress up the organizational chart.

The best way to be a good executive in a few years is to practice asking these questions today.