Benjamin Franklin once said, “If we take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.” If you think of time as an hourglass, with the grains of sand dropping one by one, not cascading like a waterfall, these images can be a powerful metaphor for understanding how you can use the time you have wisely for the value analysis projects that are critical for your organization’s survival in the 21st century.
Let me give you an example of the power of using minutes wisely from my own personal experience. Last summer I decided to set aside 240 minutes each Saturday to finish my back porch that wasn’t completed when I built my house. For obvious reasons, I won’t bore you with the gory details, but here’s a summation of my project:
First, I had to install a new screening system for my porch, which included cutting and installing about 25 new 2x4s to attach my new screening system to. Then, I had to set up the screening system, which was really a two-person job, but since I was the only person doing the work I persevered – even when it seemed impossible for one person to be able to mount, fit, cut, stretch, screw, snap, and finish off this system. I then had to buy scaffolding to finish off my skylight with new clap board. I cleaned, primed, and painted the porch white, so it would be in “A” condition.
The lesson to be learned here is that if I estimated how many minutes or hours it would take me to complete this project, I wouldn’t have even started the job because it would have looked like an enormous amount of time for a guy who doesn’t have a lot of time. But, because I wisely decided to dedicate 240 minutes each Saturday to the project, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the project.
In fact, it took me every Saturday from Memorial Day to Labor Day last summer to finish this project, or about 5,760 minutes. Now the job is completed for $300.00, and I am delighted with the outcome.
You can wisely use this same time management technique with your value analysis projects.
We required our value analysis team members to dedicate 60 minutes per week to their value analysis projects (most give us more time than requested), over a 12-week cycle, or an investment of 720 minutes. This was setting the expectation that if value analysis project managers can use their minutes wisely, they can complete their projects on time and within budget without breaking a sweat.
By employing this time management technique, our team members (on average) are performing 43.33 value analysis studies annually at a savings of $1 million for their companies – beyond price!
The key to this time management system is to set reasonable time limiting expectations for your department heads and managers vs. demanding that everyone involved in your value analysis initiative drop everything they are doing to work on your value analysis projects. This creates unrealistic expectations for your department heads and managers that will guarantee push back and antipathy from them.
If you think you can’t find time for your value analysis projects then you won’t find time, because of your mind-set. However, if you decide that finding time for value analysis projects is a priority, then there are numerous time management techniques to assist you in doing so. The most powerful one being, “Take care of your minutes, and your value analysis savings will take care of themselves.”