Management by Exception

Marduk has eyes all around his head, and he's looking to see everything. Now Marduk can't be in all places at all times, but wherever he is, he's aware of his surroundings.

We must do the same in our business. You can't see everything, but you need to look at what is around you and integrate it into how you manage your business.

There are many ways to do this for every business and the best decide what are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for their business and how to manage and interpret them. The Marduk Method encourages you to develop your own, and you probably already have, even if you don't think of it like that.

Marduk Method tracks several KPIs that are common on all businesses or entities, and they focus on operational excellence of the individual and the team. Once you complete the Marduk Business Assessment (MBA) you will have a scaffolding of the tasks that are required to run your business, when they are due, how often they need to be performed and by whom. One of Marduk's main capabilities is the ability to assign and track the completion of each task; how long it takes, who did it, when they did it, and if they did it on time. This will give you a variety of metrics that will help you evaluate the health of your busienss and the performance of your team.

Every business is different, but what they all have in common is that tasks need to be completed on time. Everyone needs to file their taxes on time, and universally people are not happy when payroll is late. Marduk will assign tasks to the responsible party and then track if they are done on time. When everything is being completed on time, no issue. However, when tasks are being completed late Marduk is able to quickly identify and notify you and your team so you can take quick action to remedy.

In our experience, one or two tasks being a little late is not a big problem for most businesses. We think of a task being similar to an appliance starting to spark and smoke. As long as its identified quickly and adressed, there isn't a big problem and the appliance can be fixed. However when people are completely ignorant of the problem, the sparks become a flame, and left unattended the flame can quickly become an inferno, consuming the whole building and sometimes the people inside of it. Having a way to quickly identify problems (exceptions) and deal with them is a core capability of any well run organization.

This is what we mean by 'management by exception' - when things are fine they don't need a lot of management, however when something is going wrong we want a way to find the problem,t o find the exceptoin, identify it and quickly take action to fix it. This is one of Marduk's most powerful capabilities.