Forestry data and boring factories

Peter Drucker was an author who wrote several books on productivity and business management. Drucker's work has had a large impact in the business world, and I first learned of his work by following Cal Newport’s blog and podcast.?

One of my favorite quotes from Drucker is:?

"A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine."

I love this quote because it's a reminder that an efficient process is one that foresees the problems in advance and has a way to manage them. Using an example with data, we might have all had an experience when a frantic supervisor or co-worker emails unexpectedly to ask just what the heck is going on with this spreadsheet. Anxiety and a miniature crisis ensues.?

Drucker's quote also points to the fact that standard operating procedures make the boat sail smoothly. I’ve been working through a code set this week and was reminded of the importance of standardized procedures and how they can make a project go smoothly.

The code set is now in excess of 1,000 lines long, and is overdue to be rewritten and made more efficient. This week, I needed to get some answers for a new but slightly different analysis, and turned to my trusty code. Turns out that I’ve probably spent more time trying to remedy the code than if I were to write a new set of code. The code was not ideal for addressing the problem I was trying to solve, and I wasn’t getting clear results. Garbage in, garbage out.

This speaks to the importance of standard operating procedures. As a (mostly) solo consultant, I admit I don’t spend enough time documenting the steps required to achieve a project’s objectives (breaking #4 in my list of tips for better forest data analysis). But good documentation helps everyone, most importantly your future self, a sentiment that is shared among coders and programmers.

Developing standard operating procedures for common data analysis tasks and manuals for working with routine data sets can help you and your organization. For the entrepreneurial-minded people in forestry, as the saying goes, you should try to work yourself out of a job. Lest you become the baker that wants to expand her business, only to find that she spends every waking hour of her day baking. (This is the story and theme of the E-myth Revisited, one of the best business books that any entrepreneur should read.)

Here’s to boring factories and well-managed data.