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Advanced Critical Chain · Lesson 5 of 8

High-frequency management

Task deadlines quietly cause two conflicts: when to escalate, and whether to help others. Replace them with a fixed rhythm of short meetings at every level, and tasks finish without deadlines.

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WIP control and sequential priority cut bad multitasking. Full kit removes the interruptions caused by poor preparation. But is poor preparation the only source of interruptions? To find out, look at how issues and tasks are managed today.

The escalation conflict, and the CC solution

A manager gives a subordinate a task with an expectation, a kind of deadline, of 10 days. On day 1, the subordinate discovers an issue. Will they ask for help?

In their mind is a conflict:

  • Escalate too early, and the boss may think I’m incompetent.
  • Escalate too late, and the boss will ask: why didn’t you tell me before?

People have found an ingenious way out: raise the issue without raising it. Send an email and copy everyone who might be concerned. Busy managers get hundreds of emails a day, so it will probably be lost. But when the boss later asks “why didn’t you tell me?”, there is a complete backup: I sent you an email. The conversation turns to the email, not the issue. Such emails aren’t meant to get issues resolved; they’re meant to protect against blame.

Any preset, time-based expectation, whether a deadline or a service-level agreement, pushes people into the escalate-or-not conflict. The result is that issues are resolved late.

The collaboration conflict

Most tasks need help from others. A design engineer needs vendor drawings from a procurement engineer before releasing final drawings. We make the design engineer the task owner, for clear accountability, assuming they’ll coordinate with procurement.

But the procurement engineer owns tasks of their own, such as placing purchase orders. When the design engineer asks for drawings, procurement faces a conflict: focus on the task I’m held accountable for, or help with someone else’s? They will usually neglect the support task. So people rarely get the help they need on time, and when tasks slip, they blame other people and other departments.

Task deadlines attached to individuals kill collaboration, which delays issue resolution, which delays tasks.

Pause and think: if deadlines cause both conflicts, how can tasks still be finished in the shortest possible time?

  • Set tighter deadlines
  • Replace deadlines with a fixed, frequent rhythm of checking progress and removing obstacles
  • Remove all planning
  • Let everyone work alone

Without a deadline, managers fear losing control; with one, issues surface late. A predefined rhythm of short check-ins gives control without the conflicts: help arrives because it’s scheduled, not because someone dared to ask.

From “call me when you need me” to a fixed rhythm

Managers often avoid getting involved early, because it looks like micromanagement. So the culture becomes “call me when you need me”, which nobody does until it’s late.

High-frequency management (HFM) replaces that with a predefined frequency of intervention at every level:

  • Some managers meet their teams daily, some weekly, others fortnightly or monthly.
  • What isn’t resolved at the daily level is caught at the weekly one; what slips past that is caught at the fortnightly one, and so on. The levels act as a set of filters for issues.

The daily discussion asks two things: is the team equipped to do the tasks in hand, and is any obstacle in the way that needs help?

Setting up HFM

Six components:

  1. Functions and levels. Decide which functions run HFM. Where a function has several levels, run them in sequence, lower levels before higher ones.
  2. Participants. Who leads and who attends is fixed up front.
  3. Place and time. Fixed in advance, so no time is wasted scheduling. For example, procurement meets from 9:15 to 9:30 in the procurement head’s cabin, every day.
  4. Duration. Because the team meets so often, meetings are short: about 15 to 20 minutes.
  5. Task tracker. Each team updates its tracker before the meeting with task progress and any issues.
  6. Guidelines. Focus on resolving what’s ahead, not on post-mortems of what failed. It isn’t a forum to extract date commitments; it’s there to support the task owner and keep work uninterrupted.

A hidden bonus: no more calendar juggling. Anyone who has tried to get a group of experts together for a project knows the pain: X is free, Y isn’t; Y is free, Z isn’t; by the time all three are free, it’s too late. With a fixed rhythm, nobody has to match calendars. Experts subordinate to the flow of projects.

Exercise: is this high-frequency management?

  • Design meets at 9:00 every day for 15 minutes in the same room
  • Each person must commit to a completion date for every task at the meeting
  • Unresolved issues from the daily meeting go to the weekly review
  • Meetings are called whenever someone has a problem
  • Trackers are updated before the meeting starts
  • The meeting reviews who caused last week’s delays

What HFM achieves

Task execution time is stretched by priority conflicts, student syndrome (starting late), and delays in resolving and escalating issues. With HFM:

  • There is progress on every task every day, so student syndrome and Parkinson’s law (work expanding to fill the time) can’t set in.
  • A flow manager looks daily at tasks in progress and the people on them, checking that work follows the priority with the right resources.
  • Issue resolution, escalation and collaboration delays are dealt with on a fixed schedule.

Task time starts to approach touch time. And tasks get completed without task deadlines.

Check your understanding

Answer all five. Get four right to complete the lesson.

1. Copying everyone on an email about an issue is usually a way to…

  • Resolve it faster
  • Inform the customer
  • Protect yourself from blame while not really escalating
  • Save time

It’s a way out of the escalation conflict, not a way to resolve the issue.

2. Why do support tasks get neglected?

  • People are held accountable for their own tasks, so helping others comes second
  • Support tasks are easy
  • Nobody asks
  • Managers forbid it

Individual deadlines kill collaboration.

3. In tiered HFM, an issue the daily meeting can’t resolve…

  • Is dropped
  • Waits for the monthly review
  • Goes to the customer
  • Is caught at the next level up, such as the weekly meeting

The levels work as a filter.

4. A typical daily HFM meeting lasts about…

  • Two hours
  • 15 to 20 minutes
  • One minute
  • As long as needed

Meeting often keeps each meeting short.

5. HFM lets tasks finish quickly…

  • With tighter deadlines
  • With more email
  • Without task deadlines, through daily progress and fast issue resolution
  • By working longer hours

Task time moves closer to touch time.