Working Smarter : Productivity

What Happens When the Top Dog Leaves?

Rich — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:45:00 GMT

Departing employees can have a tremendous impact on an organization if it is not properly prepared and equipped to handle it – especially if the employee is one of the “Top Dogs.”

How the departure affects your productivity

Ready or not, a whirlwind of a ride may await you unless you have done some basic preparation. No matter if you are the receptionist, or the next senior level manager to serve as the interim leader during the transition, you will be affected in some form or another. Your time will be divided exponentially due to the acquisition of new tasks, and the learning curve those tasks will require. In addition, your “usual” activities may get pushed somewhat to the background and can get overlooked if you are not careful.

Projects, tasks, and decisions may proceed more slowly if you are not prepared. So, what can you do to keep moving forward with a full head of steam? Document your responsibilities.

Begin by documenting all that you do, all that you are responsible for prior to the shift, and everything you take on during the transition. Document all of your projects, tasks, and decisions that you are involved with to standardize and organize them.

Once you have accomplished this you will be in a better position to organize and delegate some smaller oriented tasks out to your team. You will also be able to properly communicate expectations and how things are to be handled during the transition. This will also allow you to be able to bring the new “Chief” up to speed more quickly once the vacant role is filled.

How the departure affects general functions and processes

Does your business run on people and anecdotal information? Meaning, do things happen when the “top dog” says it should, and how it should? If so, you may find that company processes, projects, tasks, and management decisions will grind to a halt upon the departure of this person unless you get the processes and projects documented and systematized. When you move in this direction, you will find that you are not completely dependent upon people for the processes and projects to move forward, but more on a system that works and functions nearly independently and therefore managed by its people.

For example, say the departing leader has a specific decision making process proven to be successful (shown below) as to which projects are pursued, and which are not. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what that process is, and refer to it during the transition? Of course it would. So acquire the information and create easy to understand visuals, like decision trees and flowcharts that serve as reference guides for you to be able to make good consistent decisions and keep progress moving in a forward direction in the same manner prior to the leader’s departure.

Click here to see a larger version of this visual.

The final task is how you communicate this back to your team. The repurposing of projects and tasks can be an emotional proposition for some as time and energy may already have been invested, so you will need to clearly communicate the reasoning behind any changes. The remedy? Share your visuals like the one above so that they understand how specific processes and decisions are made. The more transparent the process and decision making is, the more on board your employees will be about the procedures. Also, you avoid the same previous problem of having only one person with the understanding of the company “knowledge bank” and you forge trust and team communication amongst everyone.

The personnel of the organization are the most impacted when there are departures, and if processes and other pertinent information are stored anecdotally within only a few people then everyone feels the pain – including you. Take the time to document, organize, evaluate and communicate your processes, projects and decisions to keep your organization stable.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Four Tips for “Beefing Up” Your Problem-Solving Tool Box – Part Two

Rich — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:46:00 GMT

This is part two of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #2: Be clear about all of your goals and objectives

Ultimately, the aim of problem solving is action. To engage in problem solving is to search for a solution. A solution is a course of action that produces the solved state. To actually solve a problem is to implement the solution that has been found and demonstrate that it works. Solving problems requires intervention as well as investigation.

Intervening in complex organizations requires of us that (a) we are clear about all our goals and objectives and that (b) we carefully think through the likely effects of any actions we are contemplating.

Actions taken in an organizational context often “ripple” outward from the point of intervention, sometimes having unforeseen and unintended consequences. Our goals and objectives, therefore, are typically multi-dimensional; that is, we seek to eliminate some conditions, and to achieve others. There also are conditions we seek to preserve or avoid. (See Figure 2, the Goals Grid).

If we don’t want something that already exists, our goal is typically one of eliminating it. If we want something that doesn’t exist, our goal is ordinarily one of achieving it. Four categories of goals and objectives can be derived from the interplay of our perceptions and preferences: Achieve, Preserve, Avoid, and Eliminate.

For any problem situation, it is useful to ask the following questions as a way of clarifying all your goals and objectives:

What are we trying to achieve?
What are we trying to preserve?
What are we trying to avoid?
What are we trying to eliminate?

These same questions are also useful in examining any contemplated course of action. For example, if you’ve decided to solve the problems with a legacy accounts payable system by replacing it with a popular commercial version, you are well-served by asking the questions above in relation to that new accounts payable system.

Be sure to check back for parts 3 and 4 from Fred Nickols. To read part one, click here.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

The Four Most Common Marketing Mistakes Every Manager Makes

Rich — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Mistakes result in lost business, time, and resources. Nobody is perfect, but it is everyone’s responsibility to minimize errors and make the best decisions possible.

Below are examples of routinely made poor decisions and big picture blunders that you can avoid as a manager, marketer, or business owner. How many of these do you routinely commit?

Failing to properly understand your market – Don’t think that because you have found success in one geographic region that the same plan will have the same or better results in other regions.

Take the time to understand your target market, how your product is positioned in that market, and how to properly communicate the benefits. Seems simple and logical enough, but even big companies make this mistake.

Legend has it that when a large American manufacturer of baby food first decided to introduce their brand in Africa, sales were sluggish. After looking into the matter, the company discovered that their trademark baby picture on the label was a hindrance because most products sold in Africa with pictures on the labels were used to communicate the contents of the package because of the low literacy rate. Whether legend or an enormous management mistake, it does serve as a reminder that not taking the time to understand who you are selling to can be disastrous.

Resisting change – Sometimes your routine and the your team’s routine need to change. In one of my previous posts, “In Bad Times, We Need to Get Back to Basics,” I describe this in greater detail, but the essential thing to keep in mind is that as a manager you constantly need to evaluate your processes and projects to determine if they are still viable. If not, and yet you continue to proceed with them, the results may not meet your expectations-.

You should keep your fingers on the pulse of your business so that if there is a shift in your market or industry, you can notice it, understand it, and make the proper adjustments.

Thinking “my product is so good it sells itself” – I think of that line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come” when I hear a business owner or sales person say that their product sells itself. It’s great to be confident and proud of what you sell, but are you sure you want to hang your hat on your confidence alone? 80% of small businesses fail within the first year of opening and I bet that none of these failed owners would have opened the business in the first place had they known it would fail by year’s end. And what is the most common mistake these failed owners make? They don’t invest sufficient time into marketing their business.

Never documenting processes (or anything else) – Let’s face it we live in a “what have you done for me lately” business culture, and as a manager you have to keep up with the competition or your business can be in serious trouble. However, the need to document and communicate processes is vitally important to the survival and growth of your organization, yet it is routinely passed up for other matters.

Documenting processes gives you the ability to standardize procedures which will help you work more productively and efficiently and train new employees. If the processes are not documented, this becomes far more difficult to facilitate. For example, perhaps you hire a new employee to work as a staff copywriter and proofreader. To begin getting the person experience and up to speed with your companies processes, you task the person to proofread all of the copy developed from the staff writers. You share the flowchart below with the new employee to understand how the copywriting process proceeds and so that he knows what to do next when he receives material for his review.

Because you have taken the time to properly document the process, the employee now has a visual representation for him to reference when the task needs to be performed. By doing this, you will find that you will spend a lot less time explaining company and team processes, and the delegated tasks will be done the correct way each time cutting down mistakes. Also, new employees will get up to speed more quickly, and seasoned employees will remain focused.

Producing results, minimizing errors, and making informed decisions are the centralized responsibilities of any manager.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Three Ways to Empower Your Employees

Rich — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How many times have you handed a project off to your team, only to have many of the tasks delegated back to you?

You know how it goes – you hold a meeting to introduce the project, you delegate responsibilities to the team, and before you know it your team bombards you with questions about detail-level decisions. So what happens? You end up handling a bulk of the details yourself.

So why do your team members bog you down with questions? Perhaps some team members need help staying on the right track for the project; maybe they’re unclear about the goals of a few particular tasks; or perhaps they simply don’t feel comfortable making decisions without your explicit approval.

In any case, the point of delegating is to remove the manager away from much of the detail-oriented work and to empower the other team members with a sense ownership over the delegated tasks. All of this is done to allow the manager to handle the big picture items of the overall project without constantly worrying about the details.

But sadly, that’s often not the case. More often than not you find much of the detail-oriented work kicked back up to you, the manager. So, who’s to blame when tasks are delegated back up? As the manager – you are to blame.

If you follow these three simple tips you can avoid these delegation gaffes by ultimately empowering your team to make their own decisions without constantly needing validation from you.

Provide as much information as possible from the start – As a manager you know that questions will always come up and you also know that many questions typically mean work stoppages until they’re answered, thus there is always a burden on you to answer all questions as fast as possible to keep the project moving. One thing you can do to cut down on the number of questions is to simply provide more details as well as the generalities from the start. Have your team understand the importance of their roles and processes and how they fit in relation to your ongoing projects. Give them the means to answer their own questions!

Brainstorm together and encourage innovation – The old adage that “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” is absolutely true in projects that encompass teams of people, so encourage your team to brainstorm together on the best possible ideas and solutions. If your team finds a great solution that works for a particular problem, then document it as part of a standard process for your team that can be followed the next time the task needs to be carried out. By doing it in this way you now have a standardized procedure that can serve as a guideline for future projects. The best part of this process is owned by your team members and that helps them feel more empowered and increases their emotional investment in the project, and they may even feel like more of a stakeholder (not to be confused with shareholder) in the company.

Establish boundaries - A common pitfall managers make is to micromanage competent employees. The whole point is to have your employees contribute in order to get more done for the department, and for the company, so don’t waste your time by overseeing all of the details when your team has proven to be independent. As the manager, be sure to clearly establish appropriate boundaries from the beginning which will keep everyone on task; including you.

To illustrate this, below is a process development diagram for a new marketing campaign with a manager who micromanages his team and the project details. All of the tasks colored in the dark blue are performed by the manager:

Click here to see a larger image of this visual.

Now, if the manager begins to practice the tips above, the process is cut down by a few steps, and the manager relinquishes some of the detailed tasks to his team therefore freeing him up for his other responsibilities outside of this one project:

Click here to see a larger image of this visual.

You will find that a more empowered team is more productive, functions more cohesively, and finishes what they have started – as opposed to you finishing what they have started.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Why Bother with ROI?

Rich — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:01:00 GMT

(Please note the tongue in cheek tone!)

It amazes me how so many companies put plans and initiatives in motion without performing perhaps the most important task of the project – calculating return on investment (ROI).

Put simply, ROI (Return on Investment) measures the net income a company is able to earn with its total assets and is calculated by dividing net profits after taxes by total assets. Determining ROI for various projects can be very difficult and time consuming; especially projects where quantifying the benefit is extremely difficult. Establishing values for costs, savings, strategic benefits and risks can be a very arduous task. Yet if properly conducted, determining the ROI on projects allows the project managers to move forward aware of the contributions specific projects or initiatives have to the organization and provides confidence and reassurance to senior management.

So, if ROI accomplishes all of this why do so many managers place such a low importance on it? ROI is the compass for your future success.

For example, let’s say you are a marketing manager, how can you spend thousands of dollars in advertising on radio or in publications or on the internet without a plan to understand whether or not the advertising is even working? Sure you are broadcasting your name and message to a large pool of people, but are those people your target market? And if they are, what actions are you asking them to take? And if they take those actions, how will you know?

If you don’t care about knowing the answers to those questions, then you are right – ROI is not important. It takes too much time to determine, which even further deteriorates the ROI itself. But you will find that not considering the ROI will make it very difficult to get your ad purchase renewed by the senior management if you can’t tell them exactly how the previous year performed.

Some of you reading may be thinking to yourself, “it is 2009; nobody dismisses tracking and evaluating anymore!” I beg to differ. According to a study conducted by Clickable, Incorporated in November 2008, “over 50% of small and midsize businesses fail to properly track successes or conversions.” Also, in a different study produced by CMO Council in January 2009, “38% of marketing executives participating said their companies have no programs in place to track or propagate positive word of mouth among customers.”

So I guess ROI is really no big deal. Here we are nearing the second decade of this millennium, and still 50% of small and midsized businesses neglect to do any tracking or evaluating.

I guess one good thing comes of this - it does shed some light on why 80% of small businesses fail each year.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

What Do You Do When There Are Not Enough People to Get the Work Done?

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:19:00 GMT

In our previous article, we discussed the unpleasant business of playing “what if?” with your organization and determining how to rearrange your workforce as a result of downsizing. In this entry, we explore how to attempt to maintain a consistent level of pre-downsize output, despite the decreased size of the workforce.

So what do you do when there are simply not enough people to get all of your work done? Your workforce is no longer as large as it once was, but the workload remains unchanged. What do you do?

The last thing you’d want to do is scale back core activities and effectively downsize your entire business. Instead, there are three things that you should do:

Cut “Loser” Projects

Core activities should never cease, but you as a manager should immediately identify a number of “loser” projects to eliminate from your team’s workload. Projects are typically new initiatives that are not considered to be a “core activity” until they have demonstrated that they can create positive returns.

“Loser” projects must be cut, and they fall into one of two camps:

Projects that will never be able to realistically provide a return
And projects that will generate returns but simply cost too much to implement during the current unstable economic climate.

It’s easy to spot projects in the first camp; they’re the byproduct of traditional, vague, ineffective project management techniques.

For example, a project is projected to take one month to complete at a cost of $50,000 dollars and it will produce $10,000 worth of savings per month from that point onward. Sounds great on paper, but it’s been four months and the project has cost $200,000 thus far—and it’s expected to take another two months to complete. So instead of paying for itself in five months, the project will pay for itself in 30 months. But by then, the problem solved by this project will probably be a non-issue, so this project is never going to produce a real return. It’s a loser. Cut it.

The second type of project that needs to be cut is the one that will eventually produce a positive return, but have an upfront cost that is simply too expensive under the new circumstances. If you have a project which will take four members of your eight-person team 12 months to complete and 36 months to pay for itself with new revenue generated, then you really should consider cutting the project—under the circumstances, you don’t have time to wait.

Spread Responsibilities and Cross-Train Remaining Employees

In our example from our recent post, we downsized from this organizational chart:

To this one:

Our marketing communications (MarCom) department lost a mid-level manager, a graphic artist, and a webmaster. We have seven people to complete the work of ten—what do we do?

One approach is to cross-train employees to fulfill multiple roles in your organization. Let’s use an example:

Robert the copywriter does a decent job, but he spends a lot of his time waiting on his manager and the technical writer. Robert has demonstrated some layout and design potential in the past; he could be trained in a reasonably short period of time to pick up some of the graphic design responsibilities that belonged to Basil, who was recently terminated.

Cross-training is simply a method of load-balancing the workload on your remaining employees by having them apply their proficiencies in new areas of responsibility. In particular, you should consider cross-training employees who have large amounts of “wait time” or “dead time” between assignments.

Standardize Best Practices

The final technique for getting by with less people is one that we have harped on constantly throughout the lifespan of this blog: take the best practices for completing core tasks in your operations and make them standard operating procedures for all employees.

Streamlining best practices allows you to increase the productivity of every employee substantially and helps you maintain a steady level of output, despite the decreased size of your workforce.

Even though it may be challenging to maintain a consistent level of output in the wake of a downsizing, it’s far from impossible. Managers simply need to look for opportunities to cut bad projects, rebalance their teams' workloads, determine what the best practices are, and standardize them.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

The D-O-C-E Method of Productivity Improvement

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:35:00 GMT

If there’s one way to improve your organization’s productivity, it’s by streamlining your organization’s operations using processes. Processes help businesses eliminate key HR issues and boost productivity by introducing standard methods for completing routine tasks; this ultimately increases net output and quality without requiring additional production resources.

Taking the time to order the chaos in your organization’s operations is well worth it. SmartDraw.com itself has seen significant increases in productivity as a result of standardizing its own operations using processes—and so have many of our customers, including the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, more commonly referred to as the FDA.

The D-O-C-E Method

So what does an organization need to do in order to standardize their operations? Simply stated, they need to follow the D-O-C-E method, which stands for Document, Optimize, Communicate and Execute.

Here’s how the method works:

Document the routines that every employee follows in order to complete their daily tasks. There are inevitably going to be a number of variations between all of the processes followed for each individual employee, and all of these variations need to be recorded and documented before we can develop a standard, optimized process. A flowchart is the best tool for the job, for reasons which will become obvious once you reach the next step.

Optimize your routines by constructing a single, standard process from the processes of individual employees which you documented earlier. Analyze the flowcharts you built; determine which components of each individual process are the most efficient out of the entire lot; and build your standard process from those very parts.

Without a flowchart, this step is nearly impossible—the ability to casually look over a flowchart and immediately identify potential bottlenecks is something that every other form of process documentation lacks. Additionally, flowcharts enable managers to easily model and evaluate new processes, which will ultimately help them produce more efficient, productive processes.

Communicate the improved business processes to your team and inform them of the coming changes. Since you optimized your process using a flowchart, you can reuse the flowchart as a communicative instrument either by printing it and distributing it by hand, by emailing it to team members, or by using it in a presentation.

Execute the improved process and increase your organization’s productivity—and check in on your team from time to time to make sure that they follow your process.

Should you follow the DOCE method, you’ll see an increase in consistency, quality of output, and productivity throughout your organization. The method is as simple as it is effective, and we highly recommend it to anyone who’s listening.

If you’d like to try optimizing your organization’s processes with a flowchart, feel free to download a free trial of SmartDraw.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.