In this video, Jonathan shares a tip that has improved communication and provided better time management throughout his company.
Here’s a tip and idea that we found to be highly successful that I believe will make your company run a little bit more smoothly. It will improve communication and the company will move faster.
Last month in Service Autopilot Academy, we were talking about time management. We spent a lot of time on that and this is a time management tip that has really resulted in some benefits that I’m very happy with.
Now, I’ve heard this before but for years, I put this off, I didn’t do it. I guess I didn’t buy in, I don’t know why and then we finally implemented it. If you’re interested in doing a little additional research, the basic concept comes from a methodology called Scrum, S-C-R-U-M, you can look that up, there’s book on it and such.
The idea is this, imagine that you have five people working on a project together, so maybe you have an office team and that office team is working on a new marketing project. That team gets together every morning and you’re probably in front of a whiteboard and that whiteboard, you can set this up in a lot of different ways, identifies what you have that’s upcoming, what you’re working on right now and what’s done. Again, you can make it more advanced than that, but that’s the most basic concept.
So, we’d say do, doing, done. You’d say do being what you need to get done. The five individuals gather in front of the board, you have in the do column everything that needs to get done for the projects that you’re working on and each of the five people basically answer three questions. One is, what I’m going to do today? What did I get done yesterday? What roadblocks, bottlenecks, problems do I have that I need help with?
If I was going, I’d basically identify here’s what I’m doing today. I grab my project items that are broken down into tasks of the doing, excuse me, of the do column, I’d move them to the doing column and then I’d answer what I accomplished yesterday. I’d move things from doing to done and then I would say, “Hey, Chris I need your help with this. I’ve got a little bit of a challenge here.” Or whomever, “I need you to make this call because I can’t move forward on this until you get that done,” and you’d communicate. Each person would quickly go around and do that and everybody is standing up as they do it. It’s a quick five, ten, fifteen minute thing, depending on how much information needs to be covered.
What it does, it keeps everybody moving, it adds accountability to the team and it adds communication. You know exactly what’s going on, you know what everybody’s working on and it also, if you do it in the morning, gets a lot of the bottlenecks out of the way early in the morning so that the team can really have a productive day. This is a huge time management tip but it’s also a fantastic communication tip. If you want to be in the loop on what’s going on and you want to make sure your team’s in the loop on what’s going on, this really works.
If you want more information on it, look up the concept called Scrum and just keep it really simple. You don’t have to follow the entire methodology, just start with the very, very basics and your teams can be comprised of those that are working in the office or you could have your teams that work out in the field on projects meet very quickly. You can construct a team for a month and then the team can go away and you can have different teams. In our office, we have four of these different types of meetings going on every single morning, at different times. We do four a day inside our office. I think you’ll find value to it. Look it up and see if it’s of benefit to your organization.
