4. Job logs - a recording by job incumbents of job duties, frequency of the duties, and when the duties are accomplished; examination of the routineness or non-routineness of job duties.
Given the scenario, Mary Watson is a regional sales manager for Today's Fashion, a national chain of specialty clothing stores with 200 outlets across the country, and Mary manages 35 of the outlets on the Pacific Coast. Each outlet has a store manager who reports directly to her, and there are between three or five assistant store managers that are in charge of specialty departments. Mary conducted a job analysis for the job of assistant store manager to improve management. In this job analysis Mary did use a few of the appropriate methods by interviewing three current assistant store managers from one of the outlets, and using her own previous experience to form the job descriptions, but she should have taken it a step further. She should have created a skills inventory of current assistant store managers to note what kinds of skills, abilities, experiences, and training the employees currently. By keeping up with skills inventory the organization can quickly determine whether a particular skill is available when it is needed. .
Mary could have also interviewed assistant store managers from each outlet to determine different management issues. She could've asked more detailed questions, and in the same breathe answered the assistant store managers questions about that current store. This is a timely process, but worth it in the end. A comparison of everyone's answers could have formed a well-rounded description, rather than three people from the same outlet. In the same sense, Mary could've just created a mandatory questionnaire including various questions that she thought were important about the job description, and she would've saved time, money, and accumulated a wealth of information.
