Controlling Quarter

Controlling Quarter (hereinafter, the Quarter) is the first of four lectures of Operations Quadrivium (hereinafter, the Quadrivium):

• The Quarter is designed to introduce its learners to enterprise discovery, or, in other words, to concepts related to obtaining data needed to administer the enterprise effort; and
• The Quadrivium examines concepts of administering various types of enterprises known as enterprise administration as a whole.

The Quadrivium is the first of seven modules of Septem Artes Administrativi, which is a course designed to introduce its learners to general concepts in business administration, management, and organizational behavior.

Outline

The predecessor lecture is Business Inquiry Quarter.

Concepts

1. Controlling. Management function that involves monitoring, comparing, and correcting work performance.
   • Controlling. Monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and correcting any significant deviations.
   • Feedback control. Control that takes place after a work activity is done.
   • Feedforward control. Control that takes place before a work activity is done.
   • Concurrent control. Control that takes place while a work activity is in progress.
2. Control process. A three-step process of measuring actual performance, comparing actual performance against a standard, and taking managerial action to correct deviations or inadequate standards.
   • Variance analysis. Analysis of discrepancies between planned and actual performance, to determine the magnitude of those discrepancies and recommend corrective and preventative action as required.
   • Range of variation. The acceptable parameters of variance between actual performance and the standard.
3. Quality control (QC). 1) The process of monitoring specific project results to determine if they comply with relevant quality standards and identifying ways to eliminate causes of unsatisfactory performance. 2) The organizational unit that is assigned responsibility for quality control.
   • Quality. The ability of a product or service to reliably do what it's supposed to do and to satisfy customer expectations.
4. Enterprise analysis.
   • Analysis.
   • Root cause analysis. Root cause analysis is a structured examination of an identified problem to understand the underlying causes.
   • Fishbone diagram. A diagramming technique used in root cause analysis to identify underlying causes of an observed problem, and the relationships that exist between those causes.
   • Return on investment. A measure of the profitability of a project or investment.
   • ROI. This is the much-talked-about "return on investment." It's the money an investor gets back as a percentage of the money he or she has invested in a venture. For example, if a VC invests $2 million for a 20 percent share in a company and that company is bought out for $40 million, the VC's return is $8 million.
   • "Boiled frog" phenomenon. A perspective on recognizing performance declines that suggests watching out for subtly declining situations.
5. Task performance. The combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing core job tasks.
   • Task performance. The combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing your core job tasks.
   • Work-in-progress limit (WIP). refers to work that is currently being developed and not yet ready to be released as a deliverable. For Scrum teams, this would apply to the work being accomplished during a sprint. For Kanban teams, this refers to work that has been pulled from the backlog and is being developed, indicated by cards in the ‘Doing’ or ‘Work-in-Progress’ column of the Kanban task board.
6. Earned value (EV). The physical work accomplished plus the authorized budget for this work. The sum of the approved cost estimates (may include overhead allocation) for activities (or portions of activities) completed during a given period (usually project-to-date). Previously called the budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP) for an activity or group of activities.
   • Earned value management (EVM). A method for integrating scope, schedule, and resources, and for measuring project performance. It compares the amount of work that was planned with what was actually earned with what was actually spent to determine if cost and schedule performance are as planned.
7. Heuristic review. Evaluating a product or a process and documenting usability flaws and other areas for improvement.
   • Customer journey map. an holistic, visual representation of your users’ interactions with your organization when zoomed right out (usually captured on a large canvas). See also: Experience Map
   • Experience map. An experience map is an holistic, visual representation of your users’ interactions with your organization when zoomed right out (usually captured on a large canvas). See also: Customer Journey Map

Methods

1. Peer review. A validation technique in which a small group of stakeholders evaluates a portion of a work product to find errors to improve its quality.
   • Walkthrough. A type of peer review in which participants present, discuss, and step through a work product to find errors. Walkthroughs of requirements documentation are used to verify the correctness of requirements. See also structured walkthrough.
   • Structured walkthrough. A structured walkthrough is an organized peer review of a deliverable with the objective of finding errors and omissions. It is considered a form of quality assurance.

Instruments

• Checklist. A quality control technique. They may include a standard set of quality elements that reviewers use for requirements verification and requirements validation or be specifically developed to capture issues of concern to the project.

Practices

The successor lecture is Process Engineering Quarter.