“It needs to be fixed! Now!”
Thursday, April 30, 2009
For those that didn’t immediately laugh at that headline, go watch this SNL sketch, now!
I watched a video today of Seth Godin giving a presentation titled “This is broken.” He talks about the reasons why there are so many ineffective processes that are used by businesses that don’t even recognize that they’re useless. Before I continue, check it out below.
Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
Boy, I know I’m guilty of the “It’s not my job” sin. If it’s something outside my department or seems like I might have to go through too many people that I’m not very familiar with, well….someone will fix it eventually, right? I mean, who am I to intrude on someone’s territory and tell them their product or service is broken?
But that’s exactly the point! The people whose job it should be to identify the problem are usually to close to it to recognize it as a problem. You need some outside perspective on the matter, and employees in other departments or customers themselves are a perfect source of criticism. I know that at this point I can’t objectively critique CLU’s navigation structure. I use it constantly and am too close to it to identify all the hiccups. I need to rely on feedback from others. I need usability testing.
“If I think it’s broken, it’s broken”
So forget the fact that it’s not your job. Improving the quality of things that the university does is everyone’s job. Marketing is everyone’s job. Recruitment is everyone’s job. Going green is everyone’s job. And so is doing something about things that are broken.
From the customer’s viewpoint, they don’t care whether or not we think the things we do are of high quality. They only care about the value they’re getting for their money/time and whether or not the things we do help them achieve success. Period. So if they think something is broken, it’s broken!
Baby steps
Should we expect to change the world overnight? I’d go with no. But after hearing about the continuous improvement vs. reengineering debate in two different MBA courses, I’m persuaded to go with incremental improvements in most cases, mostly for resource reasons, but also because its easier to measure the effects of each change.
I can usually come up with a Web development analogy when talking about most business issues, and this case reminds me of the redesign vs. realign conversation. If you have a totally defunct website that’s extremely outdated and outgrown its navigation structure, then by all means scrap it and start over. But in most cases you should identify a single problem, fix it, test it, measure it, and move on to the next issue.
Likewise, with problems related to business processes and procedures, try a solution on a small scale and once you’ve found success, spread it around. This is what I’m attempting to do with our e-mail and social networking communications.
So first, listen carefully when someone tells you something is broken, and then do what you can to fix it (or influence those who can fix it). Yes, even if its not your job.
Just take Oscar Rodgers’ advice: “Identify a problem. Fix it. Identify another problem. Fix it! Repeat as necessary until it’s all fixed!”