Bulletproofing Your Business - “the person who does not have time to help has no advantage over the person who cannot help.”
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”
I believe there are always going to be times when fires start that need urgent attention in any business. So it’s best to make sure you have resources that can respond urgently to these fires (problems).
Do this by building in time for critical people to be able to instantly drop what they are doing and help.
One way I try to bulletproof a business?
1. Figure out any mission critical areas of the business
2. For each mission critical area have:
2.1 A person who is Autonomous for this mission critical area
Autonomous = 1. can see if a problem arises (many people can’t do this, they are blissfully unaware there is a fire raging) + 2. Can put the fire out (just because you know there is a problem doesn’t mean you know how to solve the problem)
Obviously try to prevent as many fires as you can… but you won’t be able to prevent all fires. So you need to prepare to put out spontaneous fires.
2.2 A second person who is Autonomous for each mission critical area
If you only have 1x Autonomous person and you lose them suddenly you have a mission critical part of the business unattended! Panic stations!
2.3 An Autonomous person has ~50% of their week free of ‘mission critical tasks’.
Non mIssion critical task = if the task is not done this week it will not matter.
Mission critical task = has to be done this week.
I’ve found this is hard to do. Basically, anyone who is a manager or owns a mission critical part of the business should have significant portions of time on ‘non mission critical tasks’. Often these people are ‘strong performers’ and have more on their plate. Ie often the people who can best help are the people who have the least time to help.
Not having enough time for the right people on ‘non mission critical tasks’ I’ve found is a great way to make work unenjoyable for them. This is because if there is a fire that must be dealt with and the person who can help has to go past 100% utilisation then they often don’t enjoy helping. Don’t have the strongest performers be unhappy!
“The person who does not have time to help has no advantage over the person who cannot help.”
Done well this means that if a fire starts off in a mission critical part of the business you can have enough resourcing to immediately act to put the fire out.
However, you also need to be able to let some fires burn, AKA not all fires require urgent attention. I’ve found that it can be possible to spend all of your time putting out fires, and thereby not have time to build anything new.