I
would join the first group of managers who have chosen an objective
decision-making approach rather than the second group, which is subjective. The
root cause of the problem in hand should be analyzed in an unbiased approach
and without involving emotions and personal opinions which might arise from
asking the staff through questioners or interviews, the information generated
by the first approach will give accurate and realistic figures, which will aid
the management to do proper root cause analysis, eliminating the predictions
and estimations.
Decision-making
depends on the information gathered, to help the management we have to look for
explicit information rather than inconsistent. That information will be inputs
for decision-making process and we should reduce doubts, uncertainties and the
number of uncontrolled inputs. And this can be achieved only by gathering
reliable information to reduce the risks caused by the decision and provide
clear base, which a decision can be made, based on. Posas and Fische (p. 101) argue
that “distortions in thinking can be developed in an individual’s cognitive
structure over time” and opinions can be manipulated by attitudes, beliefs,
values, regret and person’s own personality. For that relying on personal
opinion from staff will not give us reliable information to form our judgment
based on. As well feedback from staff in this hospital can be influenced by
conflicts between nurses and doctors, ambulance staff and nurses and their
opinion might be out of context and not related to the problem in hand
Working
as a manager for a group of system administrators, I noticed that the system
administrator is busy with user incidents most of this time, and cannot find
enough time to maintain the systems. To analyze the root cause of this issue,
we started looking for tangible information to help us identify the problem and
try to fix it, we generated a report from the service desk system that include
all incidents assigned to system administrator, time to resolve and the type of
requests. The report showed that most of the incidents were of a single type
that consumed 70% of his time. Even though he is the one working on those
incidents he couldn’t give us accurate information to rely on and identify the
issue, maybe because he wanted the easy work, or he couldn’t quantify the
problem the way it was supposed to be done.
After
we analyze the information generated by the system that gives us all required
information about patient from the moment they reach the hospital till they
leave, and check if we lack for beds, staff levels, average waiting time and
severity of the cases are identified, we can reach a more accurate decision on
what needs to be done based on the gathered information. If I am let to decide
freely I would choose both ways as they complete each other, and would
recommend a set of questioner for the patients as well to cover all
stakeholders. But as I have to choose only one, I strongly support the first
group.
Reference:
Arsham,
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Posas, P. & Fischer, T., (n.d.), ‘Organisational
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from: http://www.twoeam-eu.net/handbook/03.pdf
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Terris, J., et al., (2004), ‘Making an IMPACT on emergency
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