Grab your life back with more time and more sanity while boosting morale of everyone on your team.

Ever have one of those moments when you say to yourself, “Self, I love my business—I hate my job!  Where does all of my time in this thing go?”  The new currency is time.  Grab more time from your business to have and live a life.  This not only applies to business owners but also to anyone who works and is responsible for managing people and producing results.  Technology correctly applied can give you more control over your organization and give you back your life.

When we start with a new client, one of our first priorities is to make sure a plan is in place that is meeting the stated business initiatives and goals.  The following technology plan is a sure-fire methodology for gaining that control and not letting your technology run you!  This plan is, generally speaking, a three-step process.  The outline of the process is this:  Capture the organization’s initiatives and goals (these will have nothing do to with technology); define, draw and tabulate the systems (people, procedures, and assets grouped for a specific purpose); and finally, provide some cost-effective tools for delivering on those initiatives defined in step one.

In this article I’d like stress step two in the process and discuss designing your organization while assuming the control and time that gets lost in the day-to-day.  It’s the little things that seem to keep us busy, all the little fires and decisions that consume us. Designing a system that removes all, if not most, of these time-consuming, day-to-day activities is the primary objective of a sound technology plan.

The goal in step two is to discover the systems that are buried within the business.  A system is defined as a grouping of assets, talent (people), services and information to produce a desired outcome.  We start at the white board, and then document this using a diagramming tool such as Enterprise Architect or MS Word (for templates and other helpful utilities, see below).

Once we’ve defined the systems, we now need to take a look at how to orchestrate them in a way that will most efficiently meet the organization’s initiatives.  This activity is categorized into three groups.  Let’s take a quick look at each.

Communication

Each of these systems discovered has at least one output, which is some form of communication and feedback.  This is paramount.  If you as the team lead have this single point of communication, then you will not need to micromanage inside the system, thereby saving lots of time and headaches.  We stress that the goal for communication should be less decision making and more status updating.

Using an internal company portal provides a single point of communication that is a lot more organized and stable than the company e-mail system.  Getting your team to communicate is important, and communication that is “automatic” is just as vital.  How many times in a week have you communicated about communication?  We typically suggest that a team or company set up an internal (meaning used by those within the organization and not by the customer) Web portal.  There are plenty of free or nearly free systems that enable you to broadcast expectations, task lists, company updates, policies and procedures.  Integrating a centralized repository of knowledge into the team’s culture, where it can grow and morph over time, is extraordinarily important if you are to gain more time to work on leading the team.

Learning

Have you ever asked yourself: “What has my company learned this week?”  I don’t mean, what have the employees learned, but what has the entire company learned, stored and categorized this week?  The organization that learns is the organization that can run itself and remove the pressure of the day-to-day fires.  A wiki (we like an open source system known as TWiki) system or an internal company portal is ideal to start for the small business.  These systems can be externally hosted for as little as seven dollars a month.  TWiki is incredibly easy to use and grow.  Getting your staff in the habit of learning and communicating via these tools is the really big payoff.  A year or two into using this software will amaze you as to how much you’re doing together without really trying.

Management

Are you buying hours (time) from your employees, vendors and partners or are you buying results?  The former is much more costly and time consuming to manage than the latter.  Results-oriented thinking is a difficult shift for most (it was for me).  It’s a continual process of asking “Here’s what I want out of the system in which you belong, so what’s the best way for you to deliver that?”  It does require more upfront planning, but the payoffs are immense.  Your teammates always know what’s expected and how to accomplish that—all the while understanding how it benefits the organization as a whole (a huge morale booster).  This management can be obtained by simply defining the repeatable tasks and procedures that are to be completed by the system in which they belong.

Regular task management is a means of managing and communicating what is expected of each person.  Now, because there are indeed only a finite number of hours in a day, it is useful to track the time (because it is a limitation) it takes to perform these duties over time.  I typically suggest that timesheet accounts be managed in a simple database that is available to everyone in your group.  That way, they know ahead of time which accounts they can “charge” and what is expected when they do perform time in that account.  The team lead then knows what it costs in resources to accomplish a set of tasks—it’s simple and very powerful.  Technologically speaking, a simple database to track the accounts and time entries is the way to go.  This will allow the team to easily change and grow the database over time as they learn and communicate.

It is so much easier to reassign tasks and change an employee’s load when you have the proper “forest view” of the organization.  Life of the business is much more objective at this level and will allow you to make the necessary changes without a lot of the political baggage that can accompany managerial decisions.

Witnessing your team improving is exciting made possible with the correct technology plan.  For very little capital investment, you can have more positive communication and knowledge growth at every level in the organization.  How exciting it would then be to show up to work!

All of the tools mentioned in this article are installed using simple spreadsheets, document templates and databases.

		David Ehnis is a senior partner of Electric Software LLC, a firm based out of East Lansing that provides technology management and related services to local businesses.