The Beginning of the End

I heard someone observe recently that businesses typically do a fabulous job at initiating work, and a terrible job at stopping the work when it is no longer relevant. Regular reporting seems to be prone to this, as do many recurring meetings.

Perhaps you've seen something like this play out in your workplace: someone has an idea for a perfect report, it is built and perhaps even lauded, then added to the multitude of reports. It is generated daily, or weekly, and someone arranges their schedule to ensure it is published on time. Then, at some point, people stop looking at the data, or worse yet, they spend time analyzing the data even though nothing actionable ever comes of it.

Or perhaps you've been part of a recurring meeting whose initial purpose has long since been forgotten. A smattering of people gather at the appointed time each week or month, some in a stale conference room, some by phone conference, and the talk commences around a standard agenda. Any updates? Any issues? Anything else?

Here is one of the more useful things I've learned to avoid the swirling vortex of make-work: give everything an end date. While some reports are critical to the core work of your department, too many others feed endless line items on a balanced scorecard that end up clouding the core focus of your work; cut them if they are no longer useful. When it comes to recurring meetings, the best practice I've picked up is to create potentially long-term meetings as a number of smaller series; I always avoid scheduling anything that lasts more than a quarter.

I enjoy playing the role of the innovator, the one who brings new ideas and new initiatives. The more difficult role, and the one that will ultimately determine my success, is making the hard decisions to drop ideas and initiatives, no matter how exciting or intriguing, if they are not relevant to the core of my work. If you find yourself in a similar place, perhaps it is time to start looking at the beginning of the end.

Light it up...

Rob