Fire Fighting

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FIRE FIGHTING

Usually, when people are working in teams, they came across a lot more issues than they have the time and resources to deal with. As individuals working in organization, we need to focus our resources and vigor to focus short term goals as well as long term goals and avoid firefighting as much as possible. Usually in firefighting, we allow a problem to grow until it becomes a crisis, and then we use our energy and resources to fix it. Fire fighting consumes an organization's resources and damages productivity. Teams put their problem-solving efforts for a quick-and-dirty patching. They are constantly juggling and deciding whether to allocate overworked people with more work and which activity should be compromised to handle the immediate crisis.

Fire fighting is one of the most serious problems facing many managers of complex, change-driven processes. There are several ways to remove fire fighting. They can be divided into three classes as shown below:

Tactical | Strategic | Clutural |

* As new problems arose, look for temporary assistance as short-term strategy * Shut down operations till all are solved. Allow new problem one at a time only when the previous ones are removed. * Perform triage i.e. admit that some problems will not be solved. | Strategic methods take more time to implement but they pay off across a range of projects and over long periods. Few ways are: * Outsource some parts of design * Solve classes of problems, not individual problems. * Use learning lines. * Develop more problem solvers. | * Requires changes in the mind-set of the whole organization as well as the behavior of senior managers. * Don’t tolerate patching. * Be flexible about deadlines.Measure development tasks by the number of remaining difficulties * Practice long-term prevention and systematic problem solving. |

Curing the fire-fighting syndrome is not easy. A fire-fighting...