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Lecture Notes

So what would an ideal task statement look like? So in addition to the content provided here, which is in the book, there's some additional points of guidance on task statements. One would be to use action verbs that have only one meaning. If you look at the previous slide you know there's the action verb prepare. Prepare could mean different things but they do give a nice modifying noun, they're going to say, prepare graphs. So the idea is you just want to be specific about what's going on. At the end of the day though there is of course balance that has to go into effect here as far as not creating too many tasks statements and kind of getting into the weeds of the trivialities. Probably the most challenging thing to do with task statements is to try to find it reliability. And what we need here is if different subject matter experts, so different people that are intimately familiar with this job, were to come up with task statements, would they come up with the same wants. And this is kind of a hard threshold to reach because people often have different perspectives on the job. But what good looks like here is to at least look at the task statements that various subject matter experts come up with to describe a job and at least find those statements that are repeated.