The system looked good enough. The office manager said the mistakes were due to carelessness. And it looked as if he were right. So when something went wrong, the nearest employee got a handsome bawling out.
At last the sales force jumped on him with both feet. Too many promises had been broken.
So the office manager was forced to do something about it. And, quite by accident, made a chart of the ACTUAL PLAN OF WORK.
Hello, what was this? Half a dozen responsibilities were standing around absolutely unchaperoned, you might say. Someone might come along and pick them up, or then again——
For example, if a customer on the West Coast ordered a bill of goods, and then, while the order was in work, decided he wanted half the goods shipped by boat through the canal and the other half by fast freight, maybe he'd get his shipments that way and maybe he wouldn't. Under the prevailing "plan" that particular sort of job didn't fall inside any one man's bailiwick. No one man was responsible for seeing that such orders were executed. No "machinery" had therefore been provided for taking care of them.
That's only a sample of some of the duties which landed—in his diagrammatic representation of the actual plan of work—somewhere off the map. For all the action they got, they might as well have been painted ships upon a painted ocean.
Methods in general, you see, were pretty much all right. But there was no recognized initiative back of the plan. Activities were set in motion more or less spontaneously. As a result, certain parts of the business were left without managerial supervision.
Nothing is surer to expose such a condition than actually to chart a plan. In this instance, it was simple to recognize "following customers' instructions"—no matter when, why, or how they came—as the logical primary force. Then the whole trouble was taken care of by centering the responsibility upon the chief of the order department. From then on, all instructions regarding any order cleared through him.
Thus it will be seen that the idea back of charting a plan is not to get something you can work to as an ideal in carrying on a job, but rather to get a PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK on which the work can actually be done. Then it is at once evident whether the "clothes" of the business are hanging on the right limb or whether they have been hung up somewhere on the ground where, like as not, nobody will bother to pick them up.
Too often the plan turns out to be a "sketch."