To avoid traffic, I schedule my first consulting assignment at 8 am. If the meeting is anywhere in Mumbai, I start around 6 am from my place. This routine almost failed today. I returned late from an offsite meeting yesterday. I stayed up late to finish some chores. I had a meeting in Belapur and so decided to leave around 6.45 am instead of my usual 6.00 am. It is where things started going wrong.
The alarm went on at 5.15 am, and I put it on snooze mode. When I woke, it was 6.30 am. I quickly brushed, had a shower, skipped breakfast, and left in haste. I forgot to carry my face mask. I speeded on the highway and made it for the meeting just in time. Such incidents happen many times. We present them as stories about how we delivered even in tough times.
The truth is that businesses spend a lot of resources on recovering from something that's gone wrong. However, we do not give a lot of attention to preventing failures. I think it is easier to measure and reward recovery from an error or something that's gone off-spec. On the other hand, it is difficult to assign value to things that never happened because of the preventive mechanism. For example, customer complaints are easy to track, act, and close. It is difficult to measure the impact of something we did that prevented the complaint in the first place. That's the reason healthcare thrives on treatment and pays no value to preventive health.
Usually, there are many ways of preventing things from going off-plan. I think in terms of timelines. For example, if I had to make it to the meeting at 8 am, I could have listed the following things on a timescale.
24 hours before the meeting:
Check and refuel the car if needed
Put together the papers, notes, and references for the meeting
12 hours before the meeting:
Put clothes, socks, mask, towel, other things in place.
Put the laptop and cable in the bag
Put the mobile phone on charging mode
Set the alarm
2 hour before the meeting
Leave for the meeting
I hope you get the concept. Depending on the frequency and criticality of a task or the risk involved, we can define actions on a time scale of appropriate length. Thinking in terms of timelines provide us opportunities to prevent failures at multiple levels.
Metrics:
Look at problems you are frequently encountering.
Drill down deeper. For example, if the bulk of the complaints are about setting up a machine, look at how you can make the instructions easier. Better, think about how you can send the equipment to the customer completely set.
Brainstorm with your team to develop a solution to resolve the issue.
Iterate.
Subodh
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