How to Get Things Done - Consistently

How to Get Things Done - Consistently

By Siddharth Chaturvedi

I had just started working in Marketing. Marketing activity expense vouchers lay stacked on my desk for signatures and payment. I dialed a field colleague to inquire about a marketing activity "How many customers came to this event?". "Sir, The event was a resounding success, we had all the important customers, we were able to showcase our product and there was great degree of interest", "......but, how many customers?", I gently reminded. "The customers were very much impressed with the cabin space in our machine". "Agreed, but how many customers?", Do we have a list?". "Yes of course, I will have it sent across". I kept the phone down feeling satisfied. Days past and I forgot giving my field friend a reminder, likewise for him too! Some days later, I saw another expense voucher from the same colleague, sitting on my desk. Coincidentally, the phone rang, and it was him on the line ."We conducted another very successful event at....and I wanted to request you to clear the bills so that the dealership could square off the payments with their vendors". "But can you please share the customer list from the previous event?" ."Sure Sir, I am at a customer's place, shall I call you back, kindly clear the bills". A two-way communication, with a one-way message! My field friends exactly knew who came to their promos. And , I was only trying to aggregate this data, to draw some useful conclusions. I continued to follow the "request-remind-repeat" regimen, making slow progress. My phone number soon got marked for "I'll call you back" messages. In short, the approach wasn't turning out to be very effective.

?Building Consensus

?"I have this event tomorrow, please approve the budget". I heard a booming voice, as he took a seat at my desk. The event budget was substantial. "What was the effectiveness of this event earlier...? “.”We have been sponsoring this event for the last 7 years and it is an annual affair", came the reply, drenched in impatience. "But I do not have that kind of budget, and....”, I started to explain. "No... No, this event cannot be missed....”, came the counter, even before I could finish. Sure enough, I shortly received a note from my boss, with a "Please do the needful" comment, written on this event's proposal form.

Demanding, Understanding or Both, all involved need to be taken along. Cliched as it may sound, it’s critical. So, we sat down with our sales colleagues to take them through a system proposal. The system was to propose and approve marketing events, their budgets, get event reports and analyze them for their effectiveness, with some bit of number crunching. Cut back to the signing of the expense vouchers. I stumbled upon another voucher. When I inquired, I was politely told "...., the event was conducted at the behest of a visiting senior....so we could not inform marketing beforehand".

?Habits take time to change, but if we build consensus on Change, Change becomes easier...if not 100% complete.

?All or Nothing?

Sounds like the brand tagline of a famous luxury auto maker?. But it takes quite a lot to take such stands. The existing big fish of IT systems are unable to fill all the business process needs. So, practitioners are forced to make extreme choices to ensure integration, which drag for long and cost a bomb.?We knew that integration was important, but gave priority to having "some" system, rather than waiting for the "Perfect Mouse Trap" to be built. We started with a spread sheet hosted on the cloud, with user-based editing rights. So, each user could edit, only that part of the sheet, which was relevant to them. One day while taking stock of our expenses a team member announced that, we had exceeded our budget. I knew we were close, but not over the limit, not yet at least. I asked for a recheck. It turned out to be a simple copy paste error! It was clearly time to move to the next stage.

?Customized or Off-the-Shelf

At the time of making, we had no off-the-shelf IT system that could take care of our requirements. So, we had to set out to build a system exactly as per our needs. We had a smart salt-n-pepper haired IT engineer who started building our system. Unfortunately he met with an accident and was grounded for the next few months. To keep the project alive, we hired an external consultant. On her very first day, she asked "May I have your system requirement document....”. I immediately knew, we will start all over again! I know my IT friends will snigger at me, what kind of a stone-age story am I narrating? But this repeats itself endlessly, when projects are small, reliance is on internal resources and the organization is only a user of IT.?These developments require a fair amount of detailing (time commitment), which is a diversion from the main organizational agenda. Add to this, development?resources are not readily available, internally.?Anyway, we went through a lengthy process of development, with multiple consultants and countless meetings to build our system.

?Training?

When the corporate office sets up a session ,the field offices get a feeling that ranges anywhere between "Not again...!" to "God knows What's coming next...".So when we organized a training on the new system, it took us time to get convenient training slots, but we persevered and accommodated. As we could demonstrate, a full end-to-end cycle of the system, run by the users themselves, we could keep the "yawns" to the minimum in our sessions. By now we had learnt from the past. We circulated a system manual to all the users, who wanted to refer.?Training helped our audience realize that the system could be easily accessed on their mobile phones. Hands on training ?and easy accessibility?played a crucial role in system adoption.?

?Interlocks

?"Boss, we are unable to make any new marketing budget requests..."Said a polite but irritated voice on the other side of the phone. "The system is giving us an error......"."Are all the previous event reports uploaded in the system?".... I asked returning the politeness with a touch of feigned innocence. "All my reports are in...."."Then you should not have an issue....”, I replied. "There may be a service event report that may be pending”, he added, sheepishly. "Well then that's the culprit “. I knew it all along, but wanted to hear it from him.

".... But why should I be penalized for somebody else's late submission, this is not fair!!", came the quick counter. I concurred, but gently added,"......the activity is in your region and you all are responsible for the territory, aren’t you?". He couldn't disagree. We were probably borrowing a bit from Kautilya's tenets of execution - "Saam"(Collaborate),"Daam"(Buy-off),"Dand"(Penalize),"Bhed"(Divide). Clearly my colleagues were annoyed at this seeming penalization and definitely at me! Interlocks between preceding and succeeding systems or activities, ensure that deployment is complete and has no leakages.

The Only Way to get things done?

After the implementation was over, I got a call one day. "We had conducted some events in the past and now wish to regularize them in the new system.... please consider". Our dealer partner from this territory had earlier pointed out that their older bills were pending settlement, while new events were being conducted. Under the revised working, Budget disbursals needed an approval note to be generated by the new system. As previous requests were not raised and approved ,no approval notes were available and thus no budget disbursals were made to our dealer partner. Our insistence that all requests be made only through the system, helped clear this backlog. Systems are implemented most successfully when everyone (up to the very top) in the user hierarchy, use the system, as "The Only Way" to get things done.

?Transparency?

In the earlier days, I used to send out emails to inform when budget utilization used to get close to its limit. A field team member called in one day to tell me,".... our budgets have got exhausted, more was required ".We had created a budget utilization dashboard in the system, for all to see. Clearly, we were not successful in drawing everybody's attention to this dashboard. Some of them, who did notice, quickly started asking, why we could not transfer budgets from other areas, where utilization was low? Here the list of our prior commitments (which too were visible in the system) came to our rescue. But more importantly, we could offer logic as to why we could not divert resources, while they were ostensibly available, elsewhere.

Analysis?

While sitting in a business review meeting, a senior sales colleague of mine pulled up a slide " This is how our engagement activities looked like during the previous quarter...." .He was quoting data from the system we had put together. That was one of the most satisfying meeting, I attended in a long time! Simple number crunching gave us revealing insights. Here are some samples. The least promoted type of event in Spare Parts, was the most effective of all events, in terms of expense versus the revenue generated. Events with small audience size were more effective. Event effectiveness increased if the product could be displayed, better still if the product could be demonstrated. Large events were best for raising general awareness and many more.

Some preconceived notions also stood revised. Social Media proved to be the most cost-effective way of reaching out to a mass and distributed audience. It competed well on lead generation too. SMS, long considered as old-fashioned, was the best for generating partially curated leads. I was once sitting in a discussion on whether to participate in an event sponsored by a user federation. My colleagues from Sales were in vehement favor of our participation, I pulled up data from similar events in the past.... the debate stood settled!. Apart from the new insights, the analysis gave us firm basis, on what we knew all along, intuitively.?

?We came satisfied, that we could develop and deploy a system that gave users real time status of their requests, expenses, and analysis of their marketing activities. More could be added to this system , but what was more important was?that we had taken the first steps in the right direction.

Building?User Consensus on a system, Use of quickly deployable IT platforms to build such systems, Their use by the very top in the hierarchy, Working only through the system and Sharing of insights ( generated by the system) helped us Getting things done consistently.?

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