What's taking up most of your working day?
Add up the time spent on the following:
- Receiving tasks from superiors
- Distributing tasks to subordinates
- Discussing these tasks to get more knowledge and clarify
- Emailing
- Phone and Skype calls
- Searching for information
- Shuffling paper or looking for paper, documents and forms
- Meetings (non-single task meetings)
- Budgeting
- Fretting over deadlines
- Planning work
- Updating plans
- Reporting
- Keeping to-do lists up to date
How many percent of your daily time would that be? 30%? 40%? 50%? 60%?
All of the above have no other purpose than "frameworking" you own (and sometimes other's) work flow. And that's a must, no flow of any kind can exist without a framework even if the framework is as iffy as a to-do list or yourself reminding you to answer some email. Like a river needs a riverbed you and your co-workers need some framework.
What if you had an alternative framework, like
Thingamy (that's the essence of what it is, a framework for work flows and any other process), so all of the above Dilbertesque moments disappeared?
Less annoying and more meaningful work might ensue, but if you're a shareholder in a typical services firm (advertising, law, consulting, health) this will happen:
Assuming plentiful work and 20% profit margin your profit would increase as follows when work shifted to value creating work from different levels of time spent on "frameworking":
Time spent on frameworking | Increase in net profits |
10% | 29.6 % |
20% | 55.2 % |
30% | 77.4 % |
40% | 97.0 % |
50% | 114.3 % |
And that's the annual gain even before you find out that you can change and better your business model!
What's your alternative ROIs by the way?
[Bonus: This would not be the first time, in 1913 Mr. Ford did the same "frameworking" thing for a set of typically Easily Repeatable Processes for the typical ad hoc workshop work by adding a physical framework; the assembly line. In six months they went from 70 man hours per car to 7!]
Comments