Since the supervisors of our department are highly lack of efficient management experience, there is always information asymmetry among group members and ineffective event arrangement. For example, there are mule events holding in the same period, and all members have to join two or more events. Nevertheless, our supervisors overlooked the event and meeting scheduled time and location, so some members may have two meetings at the same time. They realized this problem after they have sent out the schedule to all members couple days later. Hence, members have to reschedule their own time in order to meet department needs again. Because of those changes, I have to cancel my other appointments and group meeting time to fit the new schedule, which would cost for me. In my original plan, I could meet my team members to discuss our group assignments, right now I have to contact all the team members to re-set up a new group meeting time for the concern of my organization requirement. Other team members also need to adjust their own time accordingly. Hence, I think an ineffective organization management would waste human resources and time.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Post 2 Organization experience
I joined in the graduate department of Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA). In this organization, we have one chairman and a group of board members. There three vice-chairmen, three secretaries, and one consultant. From my perspective, there are too many board members which cause a redundancy problem. I think only one chairman, one vice-chairman, two secretaries and one consultant would be enough to manage the whole organization. Below the board members, there is undergraduate department, treasury department, social network department, media department, human resource department, graduate department, technical department and so on. Every department would have one head of the department, one or two vice head of the department, and two secretaries and members. In this organization level, I also think there is also a redundancy problem. Normally the job functions of vice head of department and secretary are overlapped. The utilization of the human resource is not efficient. To illustrate, in our department, the arrangement of every member’s schedule is not assigned to secretaries rather than managed by the new member. Originally, the secretaries should manage department event and notice everyone. However, new members do not have first-hand information about the upcoming event, they have to ask it from secretaries or even head of department first, then update the calendar later, which is totally unnecessary. In addition, new members are not familiar with each other and organization routine, so I think the higher level management members should update events through top-down system instead of the bottom up system because they are familiar with the whole process that could save more time in planning.
Since the supervisors of our department are highly lack of efficient management experience, there is always information asymmetry among group members and ineffective event arrangement. For example, there are mule events holding in the same period, and all members have to join two or more events. Nevertheless, our supervisors overlooked the event and meeting scheduled time and location, so some members may have two meetings at the same time. They realized this problem after they have sent out the schedule to all members couple days later. Hence, members have to reschedule their own time in order to meet department needs again. Because of those changes, I have to cancel my other appointments and group meeting time to fit the new schedule, which would cost for me. In my original plan, I could meet my team members to discuss our group assignments, right now I have to contact all the team members to re-set up a new group meeting time for the concern of my organization requirement. Other team members also need to adjust their own time accordingly. Hence, I think an ineffective organization management would waste human resources and time.
Since the supervisors of our department are highly lack of efficient management experience, there is always information asymmetry among group members and ineffective event arrangement. For example, there are mule events holding in the same period, and all members have to join two or more events. Nevertheless, our supervisors overlooked the event and meeting scheduled time and location, so some members may have two meetings at the same time. They realized this problem after they have sent out the schedule to all members couple days later. Hence, members have to reschedule their own time in order to meet department needs again. Because of those changes, I have to cancel my other appointments and group meeting time to fit the new schedule, which would cost for me. In my original plan, I could meet my team members to discuss our group assignments, right now I have to contact all the team members to re-set up a new group meeting time for the concern of my organization requirement. Other team members also need to adjust their own time accordingly. Hence, I think an ineffective organization management would waste human resources and time.
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I gather that CSSA is an RSO. I was not aware that you could join a particular department of an RSO. What does the graduate department do that made you want to join it?
ReplyDeleteMost of your post seems to be a complaint against the bureaucratic structure and in ability the coordinate meetings times. Some think that calendaring software is a solution to this. If everyone would just you the same calendar, then scheduling without overlap would be easy.
Personally, my experience is that scheduling is actually quite a hard problem and that things come up that are important but at the last moment. When I was a campus level administrator, I was able to not worry about this issue because I had a secretary who managed it. She coordinated with the other secretaries around in our organization and around campus to get things squared away with the scheduling.
An alternative is to have a lieutenant attend the meeting rather than you, with the lieutenant representing your interests. This way having two meetings scheduled at the same time is possible. It can work well if the lieutenant is well versed in the issues, but not otherwise.
The only other remark to note here is that scheduling problems get worse as the organization grows in size. So still a different solution is to try to do business online asynchronously. For example, the organization could use a blog. One of the officers could make a post about the issue under consideration. Other members could comment on that. That could get many matters out in the open. Then a face to face meeting can be used to wrap things up.
Currently, I am a graduate student so that's why I only apply particular department. Every candidate could apply two departments when they submit their applications. Since this is a student organization, it is impossible to have a lieutenant to represent others' interests. In addition, we did use google calendar to solve the problem which I think should be applied at the very beginning instead of waiting until the schedule problem came out since this organization has been operated for a while. That's why I count this as an inefficient management. In addition, there are more than two secretaries in every department, and under twenty members in total and under 5 events assigned at the department level, hence scheduling should not be very complex.
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