The following is a process I found to be particularly helpful in making meaningful progress, setting priorities, and getting results.
• I got away from the office and worked to clear my mind.
• I would ask myself two questions.
- What is one goal and its measurable objectives my team and I have adopted that we aren’t getting done?
- Do I have the time and effort status reporting I need, when I need it, in a form I can understand?
If the answer to #1 was “I have no idea” – I had bigger problems! I needed to get to work!
If the answer to #2 was conditional “Yes, but it doesn’t feel good enough”, I would drill down into that. For example, once when I needed real time updates on WIP progress and expected shipments by the end of the week – I had to confront myself that while I could get the information, I had to generate it manually or pull one of my staff off another project and make them do it manually.
Often, if I was honest, I had found a weakness in my ERP system. There may have been several root causes: It might be unstructured data, poorly executed procedures, under investment in automation, or unclear priorities leading to lack of discipline in data gathering.
In this case, I worked with my team to improve data gathering discipline (a day’s work in a day) and then worked with a PowerBI expert to pull the cleaned and relevant data out in real time and publish an interactive dashboard. The result was remarkable. It not only worked for me, it was adopted by my ops and salespeople! It saved countless hours of my time and eliminated arguments in management meetings!