EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT AS A TOOL FOR ORGANIZATIONAL SURVIVAL

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE ESSAY

Management study has revolved over long period of time and successive means of thought in industry and commerce have severely described it as the basic ingredient of administering a business.

In support of this view Yakubu (1989) defined management “as a social process entailing responsibility for effective and economical planning and regulation of the operation of an enterprise, in fulfillment of given purpose or tasks” while organization have been working hard to attaining the purpose for which they have been established, the issue of the time it takes to achieve this often neglected. This situation is unfortunate and need to be taken seriously by organizations if the attainment of set goals is to be at maximum profit.

In other words, organization have to properly manage the time it take to attain their goals so as to reduce costs to the bearest minimum.

Adamu (1974) has defined time management as “the art of planning a job, measuring such jobs through reducing such activities to time elements (expressed in terms of pieces per unit or time per piece) and monitoring it to determine efficiency and productivity.

This implies that work must be divided among and between specialist workers with at a time instead of the whole, thus minimum effort is applied by individual workers and maximum output achieved.

Despite the gaining advantage of time management or not attention is paid to it by organization.

This evident when one carefully leads individual workers exclaims that it is not my factors business are also find a lot of individual working hard over organization are meant of the theories of management.

At independence, the size of its armed forces were small and growth was to be a gradual process, and if the influence of the country was to be yet in the sub region, Africa and the world at large, a dynamic foreign policy was to be vigorously pursued.

To meet the part of the increasing needs of armed forces, the Omimi shoes factory was producing boots for the whole army and local textile mills; rolled out materials for the working dressed of officers and men of the armed forces. In essence a good number of quarter master items were already being produced locally to ensure that military orders for annum action will be met without resorting to massive importation, the federal government set up the defence Industrial Corporation of Nigeria (DICON).

DICON came into being by act of parliament in 1964. it was charged with the responsibility of locally manufacturing of ammunitions for the armed forces, to reduce its over dependence on foreign countries for its ammunition requirements. It was charged with responsibilities of:

1. Operation, maintenance and control of ordinance factories for the manufacture, storage and disposal of ordinance and ancillary stores and materials intended for or capable of being used by the armed forces.
2. Operation of any ordinance factory under its control on a sound commercial basis so as to fill the normal defence requirements of the armed forces.
3. Utilization of any excess capacity for meeting civilian needs of Nigeria on the approval of council of ministers.
4. Inspection and testing or ordinance and materials for use by the armed forces and duty to recommend for adopting or rejection as the case may be.
5. Testing and inspection on behalf of any of the government of the federation any substance, material, machine or any other thing intended for capable of being used by the armed forces.

To speed up the achievement of the above goals, the federal invited a West German arm manufacturing firm of Frintzwerne to provide the technical expertise required to set up an ordinance factory in Kaduna, to produce rifles, sub-machine suns and pistols under license. It was also to produce hand grenades and ammunition for the above range of small arms.

Presently, DICON is running industries complex in the premises of the old ordinance factory in Kakuri Kaduna south. The constituent factories are:

A:      Armament Factory (ARMFAC)

B:      DICON Casting Company (DCC)

C:      DICON Furniture Company (DFC)

The headquarter of the corporation is in Kaduna and is structured to have five (5) directorates as follows:

1. Directorate of Administration
2. Directorate of Finance
3. Directorate of Plan and Engineering Services
4. Directorate of Production and
5. Directorate of Research and Development

The DICON has staff strength of 967 it is also headed by a director general who must be a serving military officer of the rank of Brigadier and above.

He is assisted by the directors and all staffs under them are answerable to their directors. However, the researcher will limit herself to the head quarters which has a staff strength of 124, among whom are five (5) Directorates, 17 executives officers and 54 junior staff.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Despite the importance of time in the provision of services in organization, not much attention seems to have been paid to it. There are those who hold the minority opinion that paper qualification, not withstand ability to carry out assigned roles (basing time used) should take precedence over ability to effectively use minimum time to produce maximum outputs, consequently time management is not given the attention it deserved, and when used to quantify jobs- it is applied sparingly, which is insufficient to show results, it is because of those development that this identified the following problems for the essay:

That there is the existence of ignorance on part of management as regards to scope and specific use of time saving formalities. That where such skills exists, the level of utilization is too marginal.

That lack of prior training of executive secretaries etc in the schedule of duty, delegating duties when possible, to enhance output at its end of the day is another cause for concern.

That the introduction of such methods leads to exploitation of work.

OBJECTIVES OF THE ESSAY

The major objectives of this essay is to examine the effect of time management on the production of goods and services, as well as to determine the lessons, if any to be learnt from the results of data collected through this essay.

However, in specific terms the essay is address the following issues:

1. To find out the time consciousness of the staff in relation to their productivity.
2. To asses how time is been managed in the organization of productivity purposes.
3. To asses the effects of time management on productivity in an organization improvement of productivity
4. To identify the problem of time management in the organization.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ESSAY

Considering the importance of effective time management to the attainment to set goals by organization, it is hoped that the findings of this essay would be of benefit to executives, junior workers, secretaries and future researchers.

EXECUTIVES

This essay is expected to provide needed information for executives on time saving methods and how they can utilize them to enhance productivity.

JUNIOR WORKERS

It is hope that junior worker would capitalized on time management device to specialize and realize lifelong ambitions by meeting personal and organization goals and objectives.

SECRETARIES

This essay is expected to re-educate secretaries and how best to manage their time by actualizing in the pursuance of excellence from lesson gained from this essay.

FUTURE RESEARCHERS

Future researchers are expected to use the finding of this essay as materials for further studies orrelated studies.

SCOPE OF THE ESSAY

This essay covers the effect and problems of time management in an organization and it workforce using DICON.

In doing this DICON with large number of staffs would be utilized to solicit intention on whether or not the organization are aware of the services of the time management and the application effect of time management productivity.

LIMITATION OF THE ESSAY

This essay work requires time, and a lot of moving around. The limitation of time was a major encumbrance encountered by the researcher in the cause of her work. The fact that the research work requires the researcher to move around from the headquarters in the metropolis into the factory complex at Kakuri requires money, which the researcher is short of.

In effect the researcher had to limit herself to the corporation headquarters in the metropolis.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Management: Ability to direct human activities in the production process.

Time: Ability to guage time used to produce a portion of work expressed in terms of pieces per unit or time per piece.

Tool: This refers to an instrument in management terms, usually a person, used by another organization a purpose, aimed at achieving results.

Productivity: Efficiency of works in industrial production.

Organization: The coming together of individuals with common goals and aspiration.