Several years ago I was one month into a new job as VP of customer success. One of my team members told me she was spending multiple hours per week updating a time sheet in salesforce.
I asked her who looked at the information from that time sheet.
Her answer? Management…
“Well,” I said, “I’m ‘management’ and I’ve never heard anything about this report or this data. How about this… Why don’t you stop entering all this data for a couple weeks, and if something blows up we can see what it is and what we need to do to fix it. If nothing happens, then we can let the whole team stop trucking their time this way, too.”
Guess what happened when she stopped entering that data?
You guessed it… nothing happened.
So we scrapped the time entries for the whole team.
Moral of the story, be careful creating or optimizing processes that don’t add value.
Simplicity is the finest form of sophistication. (Steve Jobs)
What’s one process you could optimize by eliminating it when you go back to work next week?
