I Don’t Care About Efficiency
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
When I speak to organizational leaders about the types of improvements that they are looking to make within their project delivery environments, I can pretty much guarantee that they will talk about greater effectiveness and efficiency being important.
When I speak to individuals within those organizations, I will almost certainly hear the same thing. It’s what we are trained to focus on, it’s what every technological advancement ever has promised to deliver—along with every process improvement, consulting engagement, training course, and who knows what else.
And I think that it’s wrong. Or at least, half wrong. The pursuit of greater effectiveness is a key differentiator; anything that makes us more effective at the individual level, the enterprise level or anywhere in between is a good thing.
But what about the efficiency angle?
That’s where I have a bit of a problem…
What do we mean by efficiency?
To understand what I mean, let’s consider what efficiency is. I view it as the ability to do more work with the resources available—time and energy in the case of an individual; people, time and infrastructure for an organization. Or it could be doing the same amount of work with fewer resources.
We throw the ability to achieve that around quite freely—and I’m as guilty as anyone. On multiple …
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