The management of the System
" A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two" . I cannot refrain
from using this quote from the Talmud as an opening statement before attempting to define Management and discuss the various theories of. So much has been written
and rewritten about the subject in the last decades that the least I say the better. The reader is referred to any of those thousand of volumes (someone said that whilst the Bible is the book with the largest amount of readers, Management is the subject with the largest number of books) if he is curious about what
management is supposed to be about. Instead I will humbly limit my opinions to the
specifics of Management of Gardening systems within the context of the models described earlier in these pages.
Management makes use of the Management Resources of the system
in order to decide which Components will be activated in the future,
for how long and with which part of the general Resources. We proposed three basic compts. for the Management Resources , mainly Data Aquisition, Data Retrieval and
(Cost) Accountancy and a fourth compt., at a higher level, for Strategy and DM.
We also said that DR is not merely the output of DA but involves processing the data
or information in the form of Reports which are fed as an input into the fourth compt.
Ideally this will produce a list of Components which are options of the Management
Section. In a separate channel information is flowing from Accountancy as to the cost
of the various items in the list and the feasibility (budgetary) of activating those components. All this has of course, to be fitted into a time schedule, daily, weekly or
monthly. In shorthand: Management Resources produces a list of T components to be activated after June 31(see Priestley) for a period of one month. The T components
require M human Resources, S equipment and material Resources all costing R pesetas.
Now two escenarios: either you have M, S an R or you don't. (if you do, find yourself better
things to do with your time than reading this. I Keep telling you!). If you have only M-m or S-s and/or R-r, you are in deep trouble and either you quit your job or take a rest, relax and
think about two serious subjects called Strategy and Decision Making. Why Strategy
at this point? because it may exist a different way of doing all the things in the list using M-m, R-r and so forth (sometimes there are !). If no brilliant new ideas come
out you fall on Decision Making. Faced with the problem of cutting some components in the list or a percentage of each of them you have to decide which ones or how much.
There are three main tools in DM each one with its own advantages and drawbacks. The three are : flipping a coin, application of common sense and application
of the scientific method (systems analysis). The first is simple and straightforward and,
for complex situations can be supplemented with a pair of dice. Comon sense is very
popular in garden management, so much so, that a synonim for it is "garden logic".
There is much to be said for common sense as a tool for decision making in garden management: a) in a large proportion of cases we have no other tool; b) other tools frequently supply criteria for decision which are inadequate in practice ( a typical example: between a,b,c and d, choose b, provided a.o.t.b.e. anf if no relevant variables have been inadvertently ignored )
c) it works very often, particulary when backed with long experience in gardening sytems. However, it is worthwhile noticing that advantages a) and b) are somewhat negative and c) is somewhat tentative. But, since decisions based on common sense
have no guarantee of being the correct ones and are quite often proved wrong, it makes
common sense to look for a more fool-proof method, an endeavour which has occupied
philosophers and scientists for quite a time.
There are of course a number of alternatives to common sense- based decisions
and in the following we will pursue one that appears suitable for gardening management
The method requires the design of a task list for a particular period of time; for each task we write the equipment required, together with the estimated time of use, an estimation of man-hours and the total task cost. The tasks are subdivisions of the components already discussed and may be as specific and detailed as deemed practical
for the design of the list. The type of equipment and the time of use need to be listed because an item cannot be assigned to two places at the same time and because the data is needed to calculate task costs. Next, we assign a priority value to each task in an scale between, say 1 to 5 (any scale will do). An example of such a task list is shown below:
Task List for time period R
In order to make the example less cumbersome we have ommitted description of the various tasks and equipment items, and replaced them by codes; nevertheless it should be kept in mind that tasks are designated as very specific, so that Q, for instance,
may stand for " pruning tops of ficus trees in Section 3" rather than "pruning all ficus
trees of the system". The main reason for this is that for specific, well defined tasks, the estimates of man hours or equipment hrs. are easier and more precise than
larger tasks that may involve several days or weeks and where consequences from
Murphy's Law may complicate the estimation. In my experience, Murphy's Law is particularly relevant to gardening systems and particularly to garden equipment, so that when building a task list in practice, factors arising from the Law and its Corollaries
should be taken into account. (not only the Basic Law "If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong" is relevant to gardening scheduling but also other Corollaries namely,
"If anything simply cannot go wrong , it will anyway", "Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first" "There is never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over",
"the first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time and the last 10%, takes the other 90%" and " Everything goes wrong all at once" , to quote only a few. Therefore, prior to
doing any task schedule the wise reader should first review at least this Murphy's site
and apply the corresponding time correction factors. If an sceptical reader tends to disregard this as mere superstition he should read Frenkel's article about the
probabilistic basis of Murphy"s Law (Scientific American,1997,link to )
The totals in Table M-1 for man hours, costs, etc. must be contrasted with the
totals of System's Resources available for the same R time period. If, the totals are
larger than those available then a selection is called for.Within the context of the method
proposed here, the selection will be based on the priorities asigned to each task. Accordingly, the computer program is asked to sort the task list for ascending priorities
and calculate sub-totals for each priority group( Microsoft Excel or any other similar program can do this). Next we begin eliminating tasks, starting with the lower priority groups until our totals approximate those of the Resources available. Once this is done,
the nest step is simply scheduling the tasks left by ascribing them dates and duration within the time period R. An example of the first steps applied to Table M-1 are given
in Table M-2 in the next page.
There are at least two catches in the method under discussion ,namely
a) tasks cannot be eliminated, only postponed and what is the cost of postponement.
c) priorities must be assigned on the basis of objective criteria.
These two points are discussed in the next page.
