Life Coach - Step 23 of 100 - Process Maturity in Officer's Mess

An army officer's mess hosts at least 2 parties a month internally. And then there are those parties for visiting guests, VIPs, Raising Day.

My crib: Using the same analogy as in an earlier post, 20 years of existence of mess, same menus, yet no maturity in our processes.

What is an ideal mature process for officers' mess, let us say for menu selection for a party?
Availability of

• Master Menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner for selection of party menu
• Breakup of each choice into ingredients needed to prepare
  
• Cost of making each item
• Reverse engineering of menu depending on cost selected
  

How this works is as follows?
Having identified the maximum cost to be incurred per officer for a particular party, all the Coy Cdr has to do is call the Mess Cdr, refer the master menu, choose the items (depending on the season) and brief him. This process should not take more than 5 minutes.

Yet how much time is being spent by an officer on this activity. This activity is merely a value maintenance activity and hence the least amount of time needs to be spend at an officer level.

Going further train the Mess Cdr to suggest the items for the party. He is after all a Hav / Sergant and is capable of doing it with least interference from an officer.

Leadership is not about the officer selecting the menu in 5 minutes. It is about ensuring that a Master Menu with all details gets created, the Master Menu is updated with new recipes continually, the Mess Hav is trained to used it and finally the entire process for selection of a party menu should only be okaying the choices made by the Mess Hav.

Question time:
What is your process for selection of a party menu? How much time do your officers spend in this activity?
What are the other officer mess process areas with maturity opportunities? I can think of at least 5 more, as a group we could have scores of opportunities.