Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I am working a on process improvement this week. I wish I could state a brilliant insight. Alas, all I have is, “let’s try harder.” That reduces to having good people spend the time necessary to do a task well.

Blogs don’t always announce breakthroughs in any field of endeavor. Let’s downgrade that one:

Blogs rarely announce breakthroughs in any field of endeavor.

This blog post is more in line with, “Of course, everyone knows that.” I have noticed a funny thing about these everyone-knows-that practices:

People rarely practice the everyone-knows-that practices.

Case in point: my organization wants to do a better job at answering requests for proposals with proposals to garner new business. We have done okay at this in the past, but to grow the business we need to do better. I am working on a process improvement project. Trying to learn how we can respond to our customers better.

Guess what?

If we try harder, we do a better job.

I told you this was one of those everyone-knows-this practice. There is a lot that goes into “trying harder.” Some of what comprises trying harder are:

• Read requests as soon as they arrive
• Start working on proposals as soon as the requests arrive
• Have people who understand the customer work on the requests
• Have people who write well and quickly write the proposals
• Make decisions in enough time to allow people to write a good proposal
• Think a lot
• Treat your people well

Most of this comes to a central point:

Trying harder means devoting time.

Time is expensive, but not having any future business is also expensive. We will have to work a lot of overtime or hire good people to work on these things. Unpaid overtime is always an option, but I don’t advocate that.

Conclusion: trying harder is simple, but hard.