How to make it Done? Done!

It remains a painful memory -- the first time I was caught off guard by a manager in front of my peers and CIO. Yet to this day the memory helps me, because it drives me to always be in the know. After all, it’s a leader’s job to always know what’s going on in the support organization in terms of operational, financial, and customer satisfaction measurements. Make no mistake; however, it’s not micro-managing when you run your support organization like it was a standalone business. Instead, it’s smart. But how do you get smart? That is, how do you develop a process and a system to always be in the know?

Glad you asked. I follow this five-step program:

Know what you need to know

In any support organization there are hundreds of details, thousands of customer interactions, and a million metrics to track, report and communicate to stakeholders. That’s why I often ask support leaders how they know with confidence what’s going on within their support organization. Their answers vary widely, but they consistently tell me “Better Focus” is at the top of their New Year’s resolution lists. And that’s no surprise because the Devil is in the Details.

It’s easy to spend too much time on people management and quickly find that you’ve been left behind on a critical rollout, suffered the loss of a key customer sponsor, or missed SLAs for the period. You have to pick the details that are most important to your senior management and to your customers. You must find a balance between MBWA ("Managing by Walking Around"), exception reporting (one-page daily summary of the health of your support business), networking (peer and senior management), and getting out of the office to visit your customers.

Some suggested Devil Details to know off the top of your head are:

Know how you can know it

How do you know what you know? Can you point to hard data that was collected, analyzed, and verified? Or are you taking someone else’s word for it? Are you willing to bet your job and your organization on what you think you know, or on what you confidently know and can demonstrate? At best, a well-run support organization is the very definition of controlled chaos -- a proactive team with a sense of urgency yet cool, calm and collective in their approach to managing demand with harmonious process, tools and people.

Given the many distractions and white noise during your daily management routine, it’s critical to develop a process to know what you need to know. Ask yourself these questions; the answers will help you create that process:

Empowering your team to get results

An empowered team delivers results. But getting them committed to taking accountability and ownership is difficult, and often requires some risk/reward component. There has to be some or loss as a result for success or failure. An empowered team focused on the details, results and communicated closure can only be successful if they have:

Follow through and follow up

Let’s cut to the chase… Successful executives sustain accomplishment by being relentless about closure. Support leaders need to hold their teams accountable for achieving closure with every user, customer, peer and executive interaction.

Excellence is achieved only by the uncompromising pursuit of closure -- following through and following up -- as discussed in the wonderful case-study book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. The key learning’s in the book are simple, logical, and proven: Ensure there is reality behind your numbers and that you know what processes were involved in generating those numbers/results… Sleep well at night knowing you’ve exhausted all possible resources and ideas to ensure that your results predictable… Work well knowing that your unyielding pursuit of closure puts the rubber to the road.

Practice “Done? Done!”

Are you a “checklist manager”? If not, why not? How else will you know if you were successful at the end of the day?

Using a rigorous, daily checklist routine is a practice and an art that I call “Done? Done!” -- Always asking yourself these questions before you rush to mark an item “complete” on your To-Do list:

Be forewarned -- making and using a checklist does not magically make results happen. It’s a tool for ensuring due diligence. Don’t ever settle for assumptive or anecdotal data! “In God we trust, all other must bring data.” Don’t ever think you have fully maximized the value of any initiative or project based upon a checkmark against a line item on a To-Do list.

Now… Done? Done! Now go to the following Activity and Planning Guide for tips on finding the time!

An Activity Tracking/Planning Guide for Finding the Time!

1. Where does the time go?

2. Start each day with a plan.

3. Know thyself

4. Control interruptions

5. Do the math

6. Make it so

7. Start a support group