Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify
Excerpt
Sean: The question is, should I ticket the stuff I need done? Cause I’m an urgency-junkie. Usually when I need it done, I need it done. So I just go through, I go straight to the project managers and I Slack them, just take my process engineer off. So what do you think about that?
Jeff: Yeah, it’s a problem. No, it’s, it’s really the idea of process. And this is really one of the keys because there’s a sweet spot basically for defining processes. That we can definitely go zero process is obviously bad kind of a thing, but at the same time, we can go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and sit here and effectively kind of micromanage detail out every single little, Hey, click this button and fill out this form, then do this, this, this, this kind of a thing there.
And one, it adds a lot of overhead that obviously people and visionaries, et cetera, kind of gets frustrated with. The other part is it takes out a lot of creativity. So there’s like a happy medium in there. And what we look at is, really refer to it as an 80-20 kind of rule that basically there are 20% of the steps in any given process that are going to get you 80% of the value.
That’s the challenge for a lot of those entrepreneurs because they have their way of doing things. So therefore everybody needs to do it my way, like that’s what kills creativity. And hopefully you’re bringing in from your team right there, that what you really need to look at and say, okay, what are, again, that top 20%, what’s those key steps that if we do A, B, C, and D, I don’t really care how you get from A to B, as long as we’ve got A and B done. Then we’re a good kind of a thing.
And it’s, it’s trying to draw that balance and it really differs on every company, on every different process, kind of a thing. So it’s always an evolutionary kind of process working through those, but it really, you gotta hit that sweet spot because when you start documenting the six inch thick SLP manual for, okay, this is how we open a ticket or fix a bug kind of thing.
Nobody’s going to read the thing in the first place, but surely they’re not going to follow it. And they’re going to be frustrated trying to follow it. And you’re going to really kill all your productivity because, I’m spending 90% of my time following this process and documenting all the forms rather than actually doing any work, kind of a thing.
So to answer your question, yes it’s a problem, when we go around processes, go around staff, et cetera, kind of a thing, but at the same time, That potentially points to another issue of saying, okay, maybe our processes are a little too rigid. Maybe our processes are a little too detailed at that point. Could we bring this up to a higher level? Give our team some of that creativity, some of that and that latitude back because honestly, hopefully they’re smart people.
They may bring ideas to us to say, Hey, we could actually do this slightly differently and be a lot more productive and be a lot faster and we get better results, whatever. But if we’ve got them so tied down, so rigid to say, okay, you have to do all these little mining steps, then they lose that creativity and that flexibility they’re really, it. Honestly, they lose a lot of the enjoyment out of the job at that point.