We had a staff meeting today. To start with it appeared pretty normal – The usual rhythm ensued and we covered all the basics, then I pushed forward….
My personal pet peeve is the ‘normal’, the ‘usual’, ‘the way we do it’. I completely understand how things get this way – you push along through your day, concerned about the 15 things that HAVE to be done and constantly pestered by the 30 things you did not plan on doing, all the while trying to improve your lot in life.
This my friends is how blinders are installed – firmly fitted on your head!
Many people are just too busy DOING their jobs to take the time to improve them. EVERY position in EVERY business suffers from this problem. All our staff here (me included) and all your staff there (including you).
When you get trapped in the day-to-day, innovation suffers – goes hungry and dies. You must guard against this constantly. Challenge the accepted – overthrow the norm.
In our particular case, I challenged our staff to have an ‘out of body experience’ – to see themselves doing their jobs and ask WHY?
Out of this conversation the ideas started to flow. We immediately implemented one idea that proved very valuable AND acted as a catalyst for a whole series of improvements.
The particular improvement was to write a system to automate the checking of our best practices – see we have extensive documentation on how a customer’s network should be setup – unfortunately, over time things seem to slip – we make changes to test something and forget to switch them back, etc. To combat this we normally have periodic ‘initiatives’ to back check these setups and correct issues. What we did was to write a system to AUTOMATICALLY check just one of these items – just one! We did not wait until the system was perfect or all encompassing, we just went for it – added just one check to see what would happen.
In the end we turned what was to be about 12 hours of work (that would have to be repeated) using the old way to about 4 hours of programming that would ensure we would be alerted the minute this one item got out of whack on any of our customers systems – pretty cool eh?
We turned a non-productive drudgery to a competitive advantage for us and our customers just through our active imagination – through our out of body experience.
Now we have a pretty substantial list of new items to add, to constantly add additional functionality to our automatic checking system – to make out lives easier, to automate the non-productive and to allow us more time with our customers.
So, I challenge you – take a close look at what you do (a REALLY close look);
- Does what you are doing NEED to be done at all or can you just be eliminated? Be honest with yourself – I KNOW that is something, somewhere that you do that just doesn’t need to be done! Find it and kill it.
- Can what you are doing be ELIMINATED through a procedures earlier in the process? Don’‘t get trapped fixing or correcting stuff that can be avoided in the first place?
- Is it possible to AUTOMATE what you are doing? Write a macro, learn to merge forms, USE your technology to make your life better.
Look, REALLY look at what you are doing and say, with conviction, how can this be improved?
Wouldn’t you rather go home early, have a frosty one on the front porch, throw ball with the kids? Then do it – improve your lot, look at what you are doing. If you would rather be doing something else – then figure out a way – challenge yourself and move forward.
Good Networking!
Eric Hobbs
Technology Associates
ehobbs@technologyassociates.net
919-459-0109 – Direct
