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UMF

  1. U: Unternehmer

  2. M: Manager

  3. F: Fachkraft

Background

The UMF model was coined by Stefan Merath. He uses the analogy of a team building a road in the jungel:

Let me put it metaphorically: imagine you are in a jungle, together with your team.

To get out, you need people to clear the way with machetes - the specialists (F).

You also need people to organise the work so that nobody gets too tired, but everyone still makes progress. These people also check whether individual specialists are more effective and why this is the case. Finally, they teach the others how to optimise. These are the managers (M).

And last but not least, there's one more person who sits at the top of the tree and shouts down: "Listen up, boys and girls, we need to go North." That's the entrepreneur (U).

You can't chop the path, organise the work and sit in the tree at the same time.

Unternehmer

  • Who are our clients?

  • What is their problem?

  • What is our service, and how does it solve the client's bottleneck?

  • Where do we put our energy?

Manager

  • How do we use our energy efficiently?

  • How do we reduce risk?

The activities include:

  1. planning

  2. process definition

  3. redundancy management

The roles are, typically, the C-level executives, e.g.:

  1. CEO

  2. CFO

  3. COO