Fusariummy

In the first part of this series I talked about how I don't like to spend more than 60% of my labor resources on scheduled maintenance practices like mowing, rolling and raking. I find that if I spend more that 60% of my labor force on these tasks that we don't have time for the other stuff. This also helps ensure that we set a realistic maintenance standard that lets us easily work within our current level of resources. I can then use the remaining 40% of my labor to do everything else. There's a lot more to greenkeeping than just mowing so even though we can easily handle the main part of the operation with 60% of our labor, we need to be as efficient as possible with the remaining 40% to ensure that we can still get it all done. This requires a combination of finesse and brute force where brute force will require more resources but will get the job done now and finesse will generally use less resources but you might have to wait for the opportune time to do the job. To ...

Project management 101 is all about the bottleneck. A bottleneck is "one process in a chain of processes, such that its limited capacity reduces the capacity of the whole chain. The result of having a bottleneck are stalls in production, supply overstock, pressure from customers and low employee morale. [1] There are both short and long-term bottlenecks. Short-term bottlenecks are temporary and are not normally a significant problem." - wikipedia   Everyone knows that you can drink more beer from a cup than a bottle. Reduce the bottleneck and achieve more! In my last post ( Turfenomics: Productivity Part 1; Productivity Starts With You ) I discussed how you need to ensure that your production goals are realistic for the available resources. In this post I will discuss the various ways we can increase productivity by being aware of maintenance bottlenecks. Often the most obvious and painful bottlenecks are short term. It kills me when staff don't show up for work or the a...

Productivity starts with you. Productivity is loosely defined as how much work you can do in a given amount of time. It's a measure of efficiency. For mowing we measure this in ha/hr (in all but 2 countries on Earth). Production is what you can do with a given productivity and level of resources or how much grass you can cut with one person who has a certain level of productivity. We don't start early because it's fun, we start early because it's more productive and a great way to catch the occasional bitching sunrise. Every superintendent knows this. While every single superintendent I have met understands the economics of golf course maintenance to some degree, I find it useful to write this stuff down so you can reflect on it and maybe be more deliberate in how you address these problems. Here's my poorly educated but somewhat experienced attempt at addressing productivity in golf maintenance. Production Productivity During the last few crazy months I have done a...