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Questions of the week:??What is the purpose of Scorecard Day, and what process are you using to create it?

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is to share this week's question and our working method. You can subscribe to the Building Our Team newsletter (2800+ subscribers)

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What is the purpose of Scorecard Day, and what process are you using to create it?

Current Situation: We have 3 types of Scorecard

1. Starter Scorecard — This can be completed in about 10-20 minutes using 16 team members.
2. Simple Scorecard — The manual process can be completed in about 3-4 days, depending on who participates in the completion process.
3. Standard Scorecard — This includes about 25 cards, and a collective educated guess would be about 2-3 weeks with the ad-hoc manual process.

The objective of Scorecard Day is to build a system that will create any of the above three scorecards within 1 day. (With the progress we had till now, few achievers in the team are aiming for it to be done in a couple of hours)

I believe that we can do it in under an hour.

The story's hero: Automation enabled us to complete the original 4 hours to build a starter scorecard that was reduced to 10-20 minutes. Thus, we now have a formula to achieve the impossible relatively quickly.

There are two parts to the process.

A) Execution of the process

B) Building of the process

In the first checkpoint to complete the starter scorecard in record time, the system was created using only a few team members and with oversight to nudge the right direction to build the automation.

To help the team learn how to build the System, the second checkpoint simple scorecard was fully given to them as an autonomous and independent team.

This means that the team will do the automation and SOP development. It further means that each member will create parts of automation that are still pending and later integrated to complete the System. This will create a simple Scorecard in minutes or hours. It will be refined until the team is happy with the output.

Since the team was building the system for the first time as a unit, they couldn't do good planning, clear communication, and step-by-step execution, thus failing to achieve any outcome at all.

The juniors started asking the question, "Why are we doing the automation like we are doing it now?" They all started moving in different directions without any common objective or clarity. This is what happens when the team is directionless, leaderless, and visionless. The team is at no fault of its own. The lack of leadership at each level results in a poor business outcome.

If any team members are unable to understand or align with the vision of the scorecard day, they should stop and ask for it. Then, it becomes the responsibility of every lead in the team, including the juniors who call themselves achievers, to explain it to the team.

This is important because any team member's questions, suggestions, or ideas could be a source of the innovation we need to transform our current process.

Thus, we will keep running the ME Day cycle to build the System and Scorecard Day to run the System. Until we can create any of the 3 scorecard types in a day

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