Or alternatively – how do you know everything’s running ok ?
As anyone who has ever managed projects before knows the project team can either rise to glory or sit smoking and drinking coffee all day and it’s up to the project manager to work out what they’re doing and why (or why not).
So if managing human resources can be challenging at times how about managing resource that either don’t speak your language or can’t communicate with you in the traditional manner?
During a normal project we rely on items of communication, typically progress reports are the method of communicating key points but in agricultural production projects this is only part of the story.
In a normal IT (information technology) project the project manager is typically aware of all issues because he maintains constant communication with the stakeholders (development teams, business community etc – anyone who has any influence on the project) whereas within the realm of agricultural production it is for the project manager to not only manage the resources in their entirety but also to ascertain what the resources (in this case Bee colonies) want him to know.
But how can you tell what the staff want you to know when they can’t talk to you?
I’m almost tempted to throw in an analogy about outsourcing at this point – but it would be obvious and tasteless – ask me in person :-)
So what do we know from a progress report and how do we get it?
When we look at a typical progress report one of the items of information relates to the actual completion level of a given task, so for example if we have a team building a wall the progress report might say 50% complete.
In terms of bee keeping the way we ascertain task progress is through observation, in this case that means opening up the hive and physically examining the honey layer (as shown below).
That then answers the question of task completion but there are other things that we take for granted in a normal project such as resource allocation and risk analysis/identification.
On a normal project we might state that n resources will work for x days on a given task, this is controlled and governed – in the hive we can only make assumptions about resource utilization which is not actually a bad thing.
I mentioned that we also have an interest in risk analysis and identification, the goal driven anarchy of the hive actually helps us in these tasks.
When we look at the picture above we can see that there are quite a lot of bees on the honey frame – but it isn’t cram packed. This then tell us one of several things.
It tells us that either the colony is not finding enough food or the colony is not numerous enough (which then leads to other questions such as why the population is not strong enough).
You might say ‘so what’ but this is where the analysis comes in. Within any project we have a risk register – that’s a list of known risks that can occur and we normally also have another document that specifies the likelihood and cost of each risk item. From this document we then have a mitigation plan for the most likely risks, you might think of this as simply a ‘what if’ plan (what do we do if…… the crops fail, the wild boars attack the hives etc).
So although the bees have not been able to communicate directly the physical inspection for progress has lead the analysis task and provided us with a wealth of information.
I guess a comparable effort within the office environment would be finding a member of staff who is under performing (and having a negative impact on the project), having a coffee with him and finding out that he has family problems – the scenario’s not the same but the idea of analysis through observation is.
I know that this article has been technical/related to project management in nature but I thought that it’s important for people to understand that although agriculture has the appearance of blokes spinning down country lanes on tractors or standing smoking pipes with a sheep dog at their side it’s actually an environment where modern process management and project management really makes a difference, gone are the days of ‘wait and see’ farming, the stakes are too high and there are too many of us that need feeding now.
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