Our consultant visited a client with about 100 staff today. The Administration Manager guided our consultant into conference room with an annoyed face, and it can be guessed that she has just been blamed by boss. The Administration Manager then explained that the boss was angry for the IT supervisor didn’t do what he’s supposed to do.

The company actually has an IT supervisor, who is supposed to take care of all the IT-related activities, including daily and ad-hoc tasks. However, when our consultant asked the job responsibility/description of the IT supervisor, the Administration Manager said they didn’t prepare job description for the IT supervisor. Just before our consultant wanted to talk about the importance of a job description, the Administration interrupted: “even if we prepare a job description for him, it won’t be helpful, as we never know if he has done all the jobs, and whether this is something missed.”

Our consultant sat down and turned on his notebook. He showed the Administration Manager a standard template: “have a look at this template, as you can see, we have all listed out all what an IT supervisor typically need to do.” The Administration Manager got interested, but still a little bit doubted: “actually not all the jobs are daily, like checking whether the software license is enough, we only need him to check about once per month.” The consultant pulled the table to right-hand side, and show the calendar of an IT supervisor’s scheduled job for the coming month. The Administration Manager get excited: “this table really great, I can use it to check whether he has done all the jobs every day.”

The consultant smiled and added: “this table can actually help to modify schedule as well, as the supervisor may have some urgent tasks to completed, and the original schedule need to be changed or re-arranged. In this case, two things need to be done. The first thing is to make a preliminary weighting for the priority of all the tasks, and then estimate what job arrangement for the coming days, so as to avoid further interruption, and even a mess.” “Of course, you need to make a review regularly”, the consultant added.

The Administration Manager felt relaxed and go back to the original topic with the consultant originally arranged. It is a fruitful day, as both the Administration Manager and the consultant concentrated on the same thing.