This company had spent a few hundred thousand dollars to install a software for tracking all customer information. The software worked fine for first few years. Gradually the company grew and the needs also grew which the software was not able to handle. It was going to take a few weeks to update the customer relation software.
For the time being, till the software gets updated, the employees were asked to update the details in excel sheets.
Do you want to guess what happened next?
Weeks went by.... months too... and the employees continued to update the details in excel sheets.
Over time the issue in the customer relation software was resolved and the product was ready to use, but the employees were still using the excels.
One of those days, I went as an external consultant for some assignment. While passing one of the workstations, I saw the person manually enter some details in an excel file. On further analysis, I found that he was preparing an MIS report based on the excel files and there was a file for every month saved in the shared folder.
I told the manager that there are a few CRM softwares which can be used which will speed up the process why are they not using it.
The manager said that they already had a high end CRM software and I was shocked to know that the manager was under the impression that people were already using this software.
Even more shocking was the fact that a number of employees (joined in the last 3-6 months) didn't even know that there was such a software in the company. Some of the other teams were using this software though.
Apparently the manager had sent a mail to the team leaders that software is upgraded and available. Some of the team leaders had forwarded the information to their team members while others had not.
Why am I sharing this??? Because so often we have so many tools in hand which we may not be using to their full potential.
In this same example, so many people could have asked a simple question and that could have avoided a lot of manual work.
The top management could have asked for a simple confirmation whether the system is working as per requirements...
The manager could have asked the team leaders if everything was working fine...
The team leaders who did not notice the mail could have asked the manager "What is the status of software upgrade?"
The old employees who were working on the software earlier could have asked when it would resume?
The new employees could have come up and asked why so much work is manual... why not automate it?
If the new employees asked, team leaders could have pursued the idea instead of killing it...
In short, an interim solution which was implemented FOR THE TIME BEING had not become a part of the regular process just because nobody bothered to rethink.
A bigger learning I'm taking from here and have been taking quite often in the last few weeks is that a lot of efficiencies can be brought in by asking a simple and very powerful question - "How does this work?" or "Why does this not work?"...
So often we keep doing something because everyone is doing is or because someone told us that's how to do it. We never bother to ask a question "Why am I doing whatever I am doing?"
Think about it...
For the time being, till the software gets updated, the employees were asked to update the details in excel sheets.
Do you want to guess what happened next?
Weeks went by.... months too... and the employees continued to update the details in excel sheets.
Over time the issue in the customer relation software was resolved and the product was ready to use, but the employees were still using the excels.
One of those days, I went as an external consultant for some assignment. While passing one of the workstations, I saw the person manually enter some details in an excel file. On further analysis, I found that he was preparing an MIS report based on the excel files and there was a file for every month saved in the shared folder.
I told the manager that there are a few CRM softwares which can be used which will speed up the process why are they not using it.
The manager said that they already had a high end CRM software and I was shocked to know that the manager was under the impression that people were already using this software.
Even more shocking was the fact that a number of employees (joined in the last 3-6 months) didn't even know that there was such a software in the company. Some of the other teams were using this software though.
Apparently the manager had sent a mail to the team leaders that software is upgraded and available. Some of the team leaders had forwarded the information to their team members while others had not.
Why am I sharing this??? Because so often we have so many tools in hand which we may not be using to their full potential.
In this same example, so many people could have asked a simple question and that could have avoided a lot of manual work.
The top management could have asked for a simple confirmation whether the system is working as per requirements...
The manager could have asked the team leaders if everything was working fine...
The team leaders who did not notice the mail could have asked the manager "What is the status of software upgrade?"
The old employees who were working on the software earlier could have asked when it would resume?
The new employees could have come up and asked why so much work is manual... why not automate it?
If the new employees asked, team leaders could have pursued the idea instead of killing it...
In short, an interim solution which was implemented FOR THE TIME BEING had not become a part of the regular process just because nobody bothered to rethink.
A bigger learning I'm taking from here and have been taking quite often in the last few weeks is that a lot of efficiencies can be brought in by asking a simple and very powerful question - "How does this work?" or "Why does this not work?"...
So often we keep doing something because everyone is doing is or because someone told us that's how to do it. We never bother to ask a question "Why am I doing whatever I am doing?"
Think about it...
good one
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