Tag: Productivity

Consumer Tech and the Small Business Boost or Digitalization and the Large Corporate Leap?

    Jim D

Occasionally, a few events cluster in daily life that make you sit back and realize: “Wow, things have really changed.” This spring, as a typical homeowner, I had the local heating and AC service company come out and inspect and tune up the A/C. I registered the appointment over the internet and did not think anything was really different (though the web appointment was much better than previous experiences of calling and being put on hold). Yet on the day of the appointment, I received a call from the service technician while en route, telling me he would be there in 30 minutes. That was nice, and even better when he arrived right on time (this is a feat in itself in America, not in Denmark 🙂 ). As the technician inspected the units, took care of the issues (faulty thermostat) I noticed more changes. He had checked out what the proper replacement thermostat was from a modified iPhone  and then gone and pulled it from his truck. Throughout, he did everything on his phone,  making notes, compiling the invoice, getting my signature on it, emailing it to me, taking a picture of my check (or he could have swiped my credit card). He topped it off by setting up the fall tuneup. Fully intrigued, I asked about the impact of the new device and capabilities to his service day. As it turns out, all of his appointments for the day were on the iPhone as well as the driving instructions. His company had transitioned everything the field service techs did to the iPhones and ‘pretty much eliminated all paper’. His view? Things were a lot easier, he spent more time doing real work and no lost paperwork. My view? Wow!

To see a small enterprise make such a dramatic impact with IT on the everyday tasks and productivity of a small business like AC or furnace repair is remarkable. And the potential of impact by consumer technologies on small businesses was driven home when I went to the local barbecue restaurant for lunch. When the attendant took my order with an iPad and then explained they no longer had regular cash registers, I was wondering if I had been in a time warp and somehow missed these changes. She further explained that the iPads were also a huge convenience when they set up their booths at festivals and fairs.  Another win for consumer tech in small businesses.

I still remember being slightly surprised when I walked into the first Apple stores back before 2010 and instead of walking back to a register line with my purchase, the Apple salesperson processed it right where I stood with a slightly modified iPhone. Pretty cool. But now the barbecue place also? And the furnace repair guy? And workflow and invoice and payment software to match? The consumer tech and accompanying software are becoming serious business tools of choice for small businesses. They are not just being used to improve payments and act as cash registers (and of course, there are other good tools that have been introduced like Square or Stripe or many others), but handle appointments, customer communications, inventory, workflow, delivery routing, ordering, invoicing, and accounting. These vertical apps on consumer devices allow small businesses to minimize the administration overhead and focus far more on their true services to their customer.

What is also compelling about the adoption of the new mobile technologies by small businesses is the level of positive impact they are having on the businesses themselves. Eliminating paper? That has been a lofty goal of many large businesses for decades. Looks like small businesses are actually getting it done. Provide much better customer service through all-electronic customer interactions? Also being done. This enables to small business to compete much more effectively for that customer. Enable employees to be more productive from anywhere?  Check. And all while leveraging consumer-based and cloud technologies at a fraction of the small business IT costs and complexity from just 5 or 10 years ago.

And yet, as compelling as these small business examples are, recent articles (here, the WSJ) suggest that the largest enterprises are grabbing the biggest gains from technology implementations. As noted in the article, “economists have discovered an unsettling phenomenon: While top companies are getting much more productive, gains are stalling for everyone else. And the gap between the two is widening, with globalization and new technology delivering outsize rewards to the titans of the global economy.” Thus, gains in productivity from apply technology appear to be extremely uneven across the enterprise landscape. The larger firms, or the ones most adept at applying technology, are reaping most of the rewards.

The gap becomes even larger when gains are achieved through proprietary solutions that then allow outsized productivity gains. One example provided was PWC building lead analysis software that enabled 30x productivity gains in scanning contracts. PWC built the software itself, and even though there is commercial software now available for smaller firms, the cost of the software reduces the gains. Of course, if the software becomes not just a productivity gain but a industry or sector platform – like Amazon’s marketplace software – then the gains become enormous and far beyond just productivity.

As the scope of digitalization expands and the possibilities of doing ever more functions and capabilities increase with technology’s advances, it appears that the leading companies who have scale can craft custom software solutions to greatly streamline and reduce costs and enable them to win the lion’s share of the gains – particularly in productivity. Or even win the lion’s share of the market with a compelling platform (like Amazon’s marketplace). And by having the scale, when you do hit the mark with your digitalization, your gains are much larger.

Of course, making the right investments and successfully optimizing the processes of a large and complex business requires enormous vision, skill, persistence, collaboration, and leadership. It’s not about buying the latest tech (e.g. AI engine), but instead it is about having a strong vision of your place in your market, an even stronger understanding of your customers and what they want, and the willingness to work long and hard together to deliver the new capabilities. Thus, instead of a ‘new’ way to success, digitalization and technology just increase the rewards for the largest companies that focus on their customers and deliver these solutions better.

And the small businesses that are truly gaining advantage from becoming digitalized? Maybe they will grow faster and emerge as large enterprise winners in the future.

What has the impact of consumer tech been on your enterprise? Are you seeing the same changes in your local small businesses? And for large enterprises, are you seeing productivity gains from digitalization? And if you are one of the biggest, should you be expecting more from your digitalization investments?

I look forward to your comments.

Best, Jim Ditmore

Too busy to be productive? Traps of our modern world

    Jim D

There was a very good article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on ‘How to Save an Unproductive Day in 25 Minutes’.  I found it useful that the article points out a few techniques to keep that day from being a complete loss. But while the authors pointed out a portion of the cause of unproductivity (fragmentation and interruption), they failed to really pin down why so many of us struggle to be productive at work. Or perhaps to put it another way, why so many of us spend nearly all of our time killing alligators and spend so little time draining the swamp. This tendency of being ‘too busy to be productive’ finds particularly fertile ground in IT organizations.

The reason this is more prevalent in IT teams is because in IT there are are the usual ‘urgent’ distractions of email and phone calls and business meetings AND there are additional and very real urgent distractions of production issues and high priority projects that are running late but must be completed on a specific date. Thus, the opportunity and time to do important foundational tasks is even smaller. As a result, I come across many IT teams that are running at 100 miles an hour, not doing a good job of delivery of production or projects and their teams are at or close to burnout. And yet the solution to this very real and overwhelming issue is close at hand for IT leadership to leverage.

To solve this ‘too busy to be productive’ issue, you must address it on two levels: for your self and for your team. If you are running around with your hair on fire, then no amount of coaching by you will change how your team approaches their work. Let’s start with the knowledge that we will be able to change both your productivity and your team’s dramatically in two to three months. Understand that going forward, things that are important (and may or may not have a critical time deadline) will take precedence over everything that tends to interrupt but is not important. And you must demonstrate this improved choice everyday for the next 3 months. Here are the steps to get you and your team out of burnout and delivering with much greater quality and capability:

For you:

a) First, get your calendar balanced. Take your calendar for the next two months and let’s implement some radical changes. First go through your calendar and categorize your activities as either important or not important, reactive (dealing with a crisis demand or the fallout of an issue) or proactive (e.g. planning or addressing root causes). After categorizing, it would be interesting to see how much time you are spending on important and proactive work. My bet is it is less than 25%. And it is even less than that because the first part of the meeting focuses on today’s production failure rather than the planning work you were going to do. Next, either delegate or eliminate all the not important meetings from your calendar. Then, at least 3 times a week allocate 2 hours for important proactive work. Ensure you cover the areas you know need the most attention. If production is a problem, then spend two hours on root cause and how to improve change quality. If project delivery is a problem, spend an hour with your key team reviewing your project metrics and constraints affecting delivery and how to solve them. Spend at least 1 hour per week ensuring your key goals for the next 3 months and the next year are clear, and craft the messages to ensure they are well-communicated. Spend another hour figuring out how you can improve or coach your team to better performance. And stop doing every email and phone call that comes in. You do not need to meet with vendors for new products and solutions when you are having issues with your current delivery. At least half of your emails never need to be read or responded to – ignore them. Stop interrupting your meetings due to phone calls unless it is your boss or a very important customer.   Throughout your day, continually evaluate if you are spending good, solid time on important proactive work.

b) Make clear decisions and ensure you empower the team to execute with quality. Sometimes the cause of the productivity issue is a team caught up in over-analysis. If you are not making clear decisions or if you are making micro-decisions then you can cause your team to do 200% of the work necessary as they try to buttress their recommendation and collect every data point possible. Or the team may abdicate doing work they should do because in the end, they know that you will overrule them and make a micro-decision. Be self aware enough that you are causing these effects. If, in the past three months you have either recalled previous decisions more than once or sent multiple decisions back for more research than either the team is inadequate or you are not decisioning effectively. Sound out with a trusted colleague or coach if you need to improve your decisioning process. The bottom line is that you must stop requiring or doing unimportant analysis work or decision work. Let your team make the decisions for the areas they are accountable for and stop requiring perfect facts to make a decision in this imperfect world.

For your team:

a) First, set goals and expectations that i) you want them to deliver with quality and ii) you will support them to fix things so their work can be done in an improved manner. You must let them know that not only is it ‘safe’ to do things with quality, it is expected. Your team and organization may have fallen into the trap of thinking the only thing that is important is that work must get done based on the timeline, even if it means slamming something in that is riddled with defects. By insisting on quality first, you put your team on notice that this is foundational. Now, it should also be noted that this is not a pass to then have endless delays and no accountability to deliver. Instead, you must work hard to deliver in as timely a manner possible, but with the quality.

b) Use the proactive important time or your calendar to work with your team on the things that will improve how the work is getting done. Are your processes convoluted and time-consuming? Then spend time with the team to straighten them out and lighten the load. Are the tools inadequate? Then figure out what is best practice and pilot an improved set. Are things going in with lousy quality and causing production issues and lots of rework? Then stop letting poor quality change in and fix it before production. Do this even if it means a train wreck on a promised implementation date with the customer. Go and personally talk to the customer that quality is too important to you and to him or her. (I have never met a customer who remembered they insisted something go into production when it was known poor quality and instead blamed IT. Conversely, if you delayed something by a few weeks or even months yet it went in with quality, 6 months later, they invariably remember the successful launch versus the delay.) Spend your time with your team draining the swamp.

c) Set their goals and their schedule leveraging the fact the people do urgent things first. In other words, it is a natural tendency to focus on the urgent things like email instead of getting a backout plan done for a change or mapping out how we improve our development process. So, as the leader, set clear deliverables and clear dates and accountability for the important things (thus making the important and proactive work important AND urgent) for your team. It is a very effective management technique. Then, you will find that much more of the proactive work will get done.

Watch what happens then as a virtuous cycle takes hold. Because implementations start to get done with more quality, there is less fallout and production incidents. With reduced demand to work production issues, your team should have more time and focus on doing more proactive work (you must do (c) above to get this effect, otherwise they will just do more email or other urgent and unimportant work). And as they do more proactive work, they eliminate bottlenecks and rework and become even more productive. This cycle will take a few months to gain traction. And if your organization is really in a rut it may take as long as 6 months to show measurable difference. But usually, the effect is much quicker, and the first lift can be outpaced by the second and third and subsequent lifts as the cycle repeats. I recall one infrastructure component team that had a terrible production track record, the rest of IT viewed them as a bottleneck in the project process and the team, being close to burnout, saw no solution except to double or triple the number of staff. By implementing this approach, within a few months their change success rate went from the mid eighties to better then 99% and they trimmed their implementation processes significantly in terms of effort to deliver a unit of work. Everyone understood what their goals were and what was important to get done to be successful. And when I asked one of the managers to compare his team’s work to the state three months prior, he said ‘It is night and day. I can get all the important work done and our implementations go smoothly. I no longer spend every evening on a bridge call trying to figure out why something is not working. And I come in the next morning refreshed and productive. My week is in a box.’ This was the result in just a few months.

It can be tough in IT with the press of production incidents and the pressure of critical project deadlines. Add to that our everyday distractions of email and mobile devices and trying to keep up with the pace of technology and we soon lose the forest for the trees. Perhaps the best treatise on this effect is in ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen R. Covey and his time management matrix.  By leveraging this knowledge of techniques to ensure we work on the important things versus the unimportant but urgent, you can be a better manager and your teams can be more successful and have their week in a box. You might even buy copies of this book for your managers so they understand what is happening themselves and learn personal techniques to address it.

All of us undoubtably, have had some experience where we felt trapped in an overwhelming level of work and no real way out. How did you solve this? Do these approaches resonate with you? Have you employed them to change your team in a sustaining way? I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, Jim