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Saturday, October 30, 2010

Assigning Duties in Turn... But Doing It Yourself When You Must

When all employees take turns on a common task, your turn can creep up on you and cause unnecessary distress.
Many companies have "take-turns" duties, from mildly bothersome (e.g., morning announcements, cleaning) to always stressful (e.g., organizing the next study group). Let's say the company president one day came out with the arbitrary decision to have all employees take turns posting in the company blog.




The first ones to begin neglecting these types of company duties are usually the sales members. ("I'm really, really busy right now.") Eventually more blog posts are neglected and deadlines come and go... Assuming these people really ARE busy, or just can't get motivated to write anything because of work stress, here is an alternate workflow.

The blog duty is sent to employees in turn as usual, but the blog team can go ahead and terminate the process if it proves fruitless. By the way, this "Terminate End" event pattern can be useful for many other situations as well.