5 Steps To Create Order from Chaos
I have always loved the phrase “creating order from chaos”. I picture this crazy work environment with items flying through the air, managers with hair standing on end and panic everywhere….. then a second image with complete calm, everyone sitting at their desks in neatly pressed clothes, happily getting their work done.
When you are in an operations leadership role, creating order from chaos is often part of the job description. Based on past experience, here are 5 steps you can use to create order in your workplace.
1) Critical Few
One of the first steps in creating order is to determine the critical, few, business priorities. These are the most important things that must be accomplished in your desired time frame. If you ask you boss, and their answer is “everything”, you need to push back. Bring him/her a list of the projects or initiatives and work together to put them in priority order.
Once you’ve determined the “critical few” and before you begin your research and analysis, confirm what the objectives are.. i.e. what you ultimately what to accomplish and how these tie in to the overall department or business objectives. This knowledge will guide you in your next steps- and your ability to create order.
2) Become a Subject Matter Expert
To create order you must “get your arms around” the situation.
Ask lots of questions using the famous W’s: what, why, when, who, where and an occasional H- how. Talk to your boss, your coworkers and the employees directly involved with the work. Seek to understand the current situation and root causes of problems from three angles: employees, customers and the business/organization.
Observe & Report: Watch the terrible move with Seth Rogan, “Observe and Report”. Yeah.. really. No.. kidding. In addition to asking questions, simply observe what’s happening. Attend related meetings and watch employees complete their work tasks. Review reports related to the work issues and identify trends and/or outliers.
3) Get Up On The Balcony
Take some quiet time (no email, no IM, no texting, Blackberry out of site) to read through your notes and collection of information. “Get up on the balcony”, rise above the details and build a big picture view of the situation.
What have you learned? What is really going on? What are the main roadblocks and why are they happening? You must understand the root cause(s) of chaos, and the critical few actions that will have the largest impact on creating order.
4) Identify The Process Owners
If you are in the midst of chaos, you must delegate and/or empower to create order. So, identify the process owners for the main issues you’ve identified.
For example, if the main issues reside in your order fulfillment area, then the process owner may be the Director of Customer Service or the Call Center Manager. Perhaps employees in your inside sales teams do not have the proper training to follow the established processes. In this case, the Training or Human Resources Managers may be the process owners.
You will create order much faster if the process owner, owns the resolution, creates an action plan and is held accountable for results VS, you, the Ops Leader, trying to solve it.
5) Drive Execution
This is the point in time where many leaders fail. They have done a lot of work analyzing and understanding the situation, but they don’t act or can not get others to act.
As George S. Patton once said, “A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week”.
So, you must use your enthusiasm and your influencing skills to instigate, build and maintain strong momentum towards achievement of the business objectives. Check out a previous post, “ How to increase your leadership productivity”, for some additional tips for this stage.
Note: Corporate America loves project teams, project plans with dates, and if the issues are very complicated, you may want to take a formal, project approach to solve it. However, this can sometimes make the business problem even larger and delay resolution, plus the project itself may be perceived as “red tape”. Use this line of attack wisely.
What do you think of my advice? Do you have additional tips to create order from chaos? Please add your thoughts in the comments section.
If you were building a brand new sales operations team, where would you invest first or the most? What would be most important?
I recently had this conversation with a friend and sales operations consultant and emphatically stated, “Accurate, timely and effective data, reporting and analysis are the foundation for a healthy sales operations department. You must invest in a highly skilled “reporting & analysis” team and ensure that they have the right tools to execute.”
If you skimp in this area and hire a skeleton crew or entry level staff, I guarantee you will have ongoing and major problems. Here are a few reasons why:
Quotas & Compensation
In my most recent sales operations leadership role, I uttered or heard the word quotas on a daily basis. Salespeople need accurate and timely quotas followed by accurate, timely payment based on quota attainment.
To set accurate quotas, your gold source data must be 100% accurate and you need staff members who can create models, “what if” analyses and link up sales goals with the financials. They should also be able to advise your sales leaders on the likely difficulty level in achieving quotas and what is “most fair”.
To pay your salesforce correctly, you need staff members who can pull accurate data (think Microsoft Access, SAS, Business Objects, queries), on time and effectively match it up to the sales quotas and calculate the appropriate payout. This is no easy task considering the complex compensation plans and manual adjustments, which we deal with in most sales organizations.
(On a related note, sales contests and recognition programs often require the same types of data and reporting – that must be accurate and timely.)
CRM – Garbage In, Garbage Out
CRM systems have become commonplace in most sales organizations, and I bet if you surveyed your sales people they would tell you that the data within the CRM needs to be updated.
Contact information and “lead data” must be cleansed on an ongoing basis, in order to remain relevant and to maintain or improve sales productivity. Do you want your sales team calling wrong numbers or closing deals? Please refer to an earlier post called “How clean is your sales data” for more information and ideas.
Don’t expect the marketing or IT team to staff an employee who worries about your CRM sales data. This should be part of someone’s job on the Sales Operations team.
Decision Making
A sales operations reporting leader should ensure that the sales leadership team has the information that they need at their fingertips, to make sound decisions and move their teams towards goal achievement. This is beyond just pumping out reports. They needs to help identify the right leading and lagging key indicators and activities that will help predict future success. They need to create “real time” reporting, so sales leaders can measure progress at any time. And, these critical reports must be 100% accurate.
Who should you hire?
To head up a reporting/analysis function, you must find a senior level, experienced “data nerd” who is familiar with different ways to extract, massage and present data. They need to be able to be able to link big picture thinking with the right metrics and analysis. They must be extremely detail oriented with skills in QCing data.
The leader should also know how to automate reporting. Even with a sales team of 1,000 people, you should not need an army of analysts creating manual reports for you. With a front end investment in time, query programming, and basic tools, many ongoing reports should require minimal human manipulation. And, a well designed, real time dashboard report, can be an extremely valuable tool.
I know from past experience that it is hard to find this mix of skills and experience. When you do, pay them well. Investing an extra $20k in a base salary here could results in thousands of dollars in saved time and problems later.. or even millions of extra dollars towards your quote achievement. If salespeople are not distracted by bad quotas, incorrect payouts or obsolete CRM data… They wlll be off selling.
How valuable is your reporting and analysis team? Do you agree with my recommendations? Please add your comments….
