Combining Everyone's Best Habits - Lessons Learned
I often tell the story of how one of our technicians, Dan, changed the way we entered tickets forever. One day, I sent him off with the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. Monday, he came into the office with a suggestion:
Whenever we work on a ticket but do not finish the job and close the ticket, we should take a minute and note where we are in the process. For example, if you’ve wired up two access points and they’re working, but you have one more to go, just drop a note in the ticket.
And the note always
begins: WITNS (pronounced “witness”). It stands for “What is the next step?”
This little habit is
very handy for lots of jobs that are half-done when the day comes to an end, or
a technician has to leave a job to take care of an emergency. It can also be
used as a self-reminder when a tech takes a lunch break.
We adopted this habit
from then on. It saved us hundreds, and maybe thousands of hours of rework over
the next ten years. Simple. Powerful. Easy to understand. What more can you ask
for?
The reason I tell that
story is that we adopted a lot of habits and procedures from many employees
over the years. How we handle money. How we label drives. How we enter notes. The
ordering process. Server setups. And on and on.
Everyone with some
experience knows some good tips. They don’t have to be profound or amazing. If
you improve your business constantly with hundreds of tiny improvements per
year, it will make a dramatic difference.
A few habits that really
stand out are:
Cutting cables in
half. Technicians (and clients) hate to throw things away, even if they’re
broken. So, troublesome cables are taken out of service and put in some box
somewhere. And one day, the customer or a technician will find that cable and
plug it in. Then we have to chase the same ghost we already caught.
So we just cut the cable
in half. Right in the middle. No client can use it. And a technician who wants to put new ends on it should test the “new” cable out of habit. But WE never
reused those cables. The reason is simple: we rarely sold a cable that was more
expensive than an hour of a technicians time!
Velcro. This one made
it into the Managed Services Operation Manual. Put the soft side of the Velcro
on the bottom of a device. Every time. The scratchy side can go on the shelf or
the wall. If that device is set down on something that shouldn’t scratched, you’re
in good shape. And if this is the habit on every use of Velcro, any device you
pick up can be put down on the other half of the Velcro and no one has to think
about it.
Tape courtesy fold.
This is the habit of folding over the end of a tape on a roll so that you never
have to “find” the end, and you never have to spend time scratching it to get
it started again. I never had a name for this, but my daughter calls it a
courtesy fold. When anyone else picks up that roll, they won’t have to wrestle
the end either. She has passed that on to others in various jobs. Again, this
sounds really small until you consider how many times per year you pick up a
roll of tape!
Labeling drives. This
is huge. We label drives and drive bays so any tech can walk in and do whatever
they need to on a NAS or a server and they’ll know where those drives go back.
Of course this is helpful with RAID arrays, but it’s also a good troubleshooting
habit. If you’re going to move things around and need to put them back, it’s a
no-brainer if everything’s labeled. And when you order a replacement drive for
one that’s giving you trouble, you can send out any technician because no one
has to remember which drive it was and where it went. A simple note in the
ticket takes care of that.
And on and on. I hope
you’ve got dozens, or maybe hundreds of these little habits.
The “process” for
adopting these habits is very simple for anyone who doesn’t practice a top-down
command-and-control management style. Just listen. Be open to letting the newest
employee make suggestions. Good ideas can come from anywhere.
Employees need to be encouraged
to offer suggestions. And they need to know that they won’t be ridiculed if
some just won’t work or have already been tried and rejected. Inform them
without making them feel foolish. Let them continue to bring suggestions.
Let your employees
improve your business. That’s a good habit!
Feedback always welcome.
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Episode 57
This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page.
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