Well, first what the heck do we mean by effectiveness? I guess to attempt to accomplish a given objective using the minimum required resources (time, money, assets, etc).
So we have some key challenges here:
- We need to try and avoid time spent 'waiting' going to waste
- What we rely on may or may not appear as planned
- Sometimes a lot of personal follow-up is required
Well technology gives us an answer to the first issue. Now everything I need to do 99% of my jobs is sitting on my laptop - so anywhere anytime I can just get on with something that I need to be doing (coding, writing, whatever).
Sometimes things that we are relying on may or may not happen as planned. Clearly then we need to throw out Just in Time (JIT) methods. One of the pre-requisites of JIT is to have an extremely reliable supply chain, otherwise the overheads saved are going to be a lot lot less than the wastage / cost of not having the item / stock etc. that we were relying on.
Personal followup - this is a tricky one. Somehow it feels like this could be automated, but I'm sure that an automated phone recording just would not have the same effect as actual follow-up / checks. So I better budget it in my plan. Padding schedules to account for this is legit.
On the frontier in the developing world many places are running like this. Too often my first instinct was to try and fight all of the above. Yet this all too often might be just a painful failure.
Actually the funny thing is this - in an environment of uncertainty where things may or may not come together; it actually makes rather a lot of sense to have quite a few different things going on at once. Putting all the eggs in one well defined clearly planned basket may have a much higher chance of failure than other places. So rapidly changing plans and possibly having a few extra plans is pretty sensible really...
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