Ad-hoc vs A System

A scene in a movie used to be when someone is on a phone call and he wants to write something, he’ll grab a post-it and scribble on it. This is what comes to my mind whenever someone says ad-hoc, a form of temporary solution that is required urgently, and normally is not for a long time. For example the person wouldn’t start to write down a novel on the post-it nor would someone recite through a phone to transcript a long article.

Taking that example even further, to write a novel, a person would have a laptop or if he is old-fashioned, a typewriter. And most writer say they have a routine or set up of how they write. This is a system.

Both examples are from different end of the spectrum, between writing a few numbers to a 40,000 words novel. But what happens if you want to write around 40 items? What if it varies between 40 -400 words? That is the intricacy or the balance that needs to be found when managing a project. If the situation is most likely a one-off situation, an ad-hoc would be most suitable, like the post-it. Sometimes though the one-off keeps happening again, and you get the situation where a person has post-it plastered all over his computer monitor.

My comment to that is, after investigating why a one-off keeps happening, the manager should decided whether he needs a system or not. I think experienced managers have a hunch of which is which, but for newcomers like us, this a very difficult situation.