Dear Bob ... I just read your advice to Unwilling Reviewer. I'm jealous. He has one employee who doesn't bring him finished work. I have a whole department full of employees who are terrific at getting the work nearly finished. It's that last couple of percent that's killing me. I'm seriously thinking of hiring a finisher, to take all the work that gets close to completion and polish it up. What do you Dear Bob …I just read your advice to Unwilling Reviewer. I’m jealous. He has one employee who doesn’t bring him finished work. I have a whole department full of employees who are terrific at getting the work nearly finished. It’s that last couple of percent that’s killing me.I’m seriously thinking of hiring a finisher, to take all the work that gets close to completion and polish it up. What do you think? – Managing a lot of in process inventoryDear Inventory Manager …What do I think of hiring a finisher? Well of course not. All you’d be doing is letting everyone in your department know it’s okay to not finish their assignments. Which, I’m guessing, you’ve already done in one way or another. It takes no special skill to get work close to completion, for the simple reason that getting any piece of work to the 98% stage requires only half the total effort. That last 2% takes the other half, because it was never 2% in the first place. If it’s a piece of software, for example, that last two percent includes tracking down and fixing all the little bugs that creep in; writing technical and user documentation; developing end-user training materials, scheduling training sessions, and conducting them; performing the final software conversion … the list goes on.My guess is that you have two problems. The first is that you haven’t established an expectation that Work Gets Finished Around Here. Don’t let employees off the hook.The other problem will also solve the first problem: I’ll bet nobody works to a plan, because “this isn’t big enough to be a project.” True enough; that doesn’t mean its so small that it doesn’t require a plan. So for those who tell you their assignments don’t require a plan, let them know, that’s okay. Right up until the moment they miss a deadline. From that moment forward, they need to produce a detailed timeline that shows every task required to get the work finished, along with their estimate of how long every task will take.And, they have to review progress against those plans with you once a week until the work is finished.Because what’s going on is that your staff don’t start out with a realistic picture of how much work an assignment will take. So when they get to that 98% stage, they’ve used up all of the emotional energy they reserved for it. They’re done, mentally, no matter how much work is left. The plan will help them pace themselves so they can get to the finish line.– Bob ——– Technology Industry