see oh...

The Principal was shocked, 33 students had failed in Mathematics and out of them 20 had failed in Science too in the pre-board examination. She had conducted a meeting before the pre-boards and based on the past performance the teachers had pointed out there were only 3 or 4 slow learners. Suddenly she was facing an uphill task of ensuring a cent per cent result for the school and to top it all this was her first year as the principal.

The CEO of another company had just thrown out the GM from one of the facilities, and in his first meeting with the new GM, he mentioned that they were facing too many client rejections in the last quarter. The new GM went back and conducted a test to check the quality and production efficiency among his production staff, and to his big surprise found that more than 50% were croppers. All of them were thrown out.

Two different stories, but the lessons learned from them are similar. Too much dependence on MIS has reduced heads of units and organizations to just monitors of dashboards. It needs to be understood that people will show their reporting authorities only what is palatable while the dark and murkier side will always be under eclipse. In both the above cases the responsibility of ensuring that the reports truly represented the ground situation lied with the unit heads. Most unit heads are comfortable with whatever information is provided by their managers because they don’t want to dirty their hands. Another excuse is apprehension regarding micro-management. In the above two cases it’s clear that implementation of proper checks and balances could have prevented the sudden catastrophe. And yes, having a mechanism to corroborate information is not micro-management.