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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Last Sunday wasn’t my own. I’m part of a pursuit team, and we had to rehearse face-to-face to prepare for Monday morning’s presentation.

For me, giving up a Sunday for my employer is an unusual event. For many present-day CIOs and IT managers it’s a way of life.

Does it have to be this way?

The answer is predictable: It depends.

Of course.

But even though it depends, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t depend all that much.

What’s out of your control is your company’s management culture. If weekend hours are a cultural compulsion you had better leave a trail of obvious I-was-paying-attention-to-business bread crumbs behind, complemented by regular in-person appearances. The alternative is to be told you just don’t have the work ethic (don’t get me started) to be part of the team.

That leaves the other side of the it-depends dividing line: When there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get all the work done that needs doing … not occasionally when a crunch hits, but because that’s the nature of the job.

In my experience, there are just a few reasons days don’t have enough hours, most of which are under a manager’s control. Some of the biggies:

Failing to delegate

When a manager has too much work, he/she probably hasn’t given enough of it away.

Don’t you wish you were paid to have brilliant insights like that?

The delegate-more advice does come with a few caveats (you’ll find them, and more, in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World , yours truly, 2011):

> Delegation is collaboration: You get to define the desired outcome. If you’re smart you’ll allow for the possibility that there’s a better one than what you thought of.

> Delegation isn’t a paint-by-numbers exercise: The person you’re delegating to should be the one to come up with the plan. You do get to critique the plan and make suggestions (see previous bullet). You also meet regularly during the course of the work to monitor progress and, if appropriate, make suggestions (see previous bullet).

> Success isn’t what you would have done if you’d done the work: In most cases there’s more than one right answer. Be open to the possibility your sense of aesthetics is a matter of opinion.

> Who did you hire? If there’s nobody in your organization you can delegate something to, consider the possibility that you’re hiring the wrong people.

Comfort zones

All of us … and I’m no exception … like and are more comfortable with some kinds of work than others. It isn’t unknown for even the best managers and staff to unconsciously increase the priority of comfortable tasks and decrease the priority of uncomfortable ones.

And so, you end your day with the glow of satisfied accomplishment that comes from converting a few PowerPoint presentations to the company’s new standard template, attenuated by the nagging concern that maybe you should have worked fewer hours on this and more on getting performance appraisals done.

Yes, yes, yes, I know: Hard work and perseverance pay off in the long run, but procrastination pays off right now. This works just fine until you can’t procrastinate any longer. Then you work after work hours instead of during them.

During is better.

Master your tools

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Project, and so on are the tools of your trade. Within each one of them there are features that can help you get work done faster. The missing piece: Most people aren’t willing to learn them. The result: Everything they do that makes use of these tools takes longer than it should. Much longer.

It’s like someone who hauls a big rug out back to hang over a clothesline so they can beat the dust out of it, because they refuse to learn how to run a vacuum cleaner. Sorta.

The infinite pile of work

The pile of work you have to do is finite. The pile of work you might do if you collect everything you might do and add each and every item to the stack is infinite, or, if not infinite, like Einstein’s explanation of the universe: finite but unbounded.

One way or another, there are people who see every pile of work as boundless. These folks always manage to find yet another task to fill out their 70-hour work week, because for them every un-undertaken task is an unscratched itch.

If you’re one of these unfortunate souls, I have no metaphors to offer by way of a solution. But don’t complain about your unreasonable workload.

It’s a self-inflicted wound.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Here’s another version of this week’s ManagementSpeak:

“We are effectively a technology and marketing business that just so happens to be in the insurance space. It’s an important mindset to drive. When a consumer comes to our website, they don’t compare us to GEICO, Progressive or The Hartford. They compare us to Amazon, Zappos and Expedia in terms of their experience.”

– Kevin Kerridge, head of direct, Hiscox USA

Well, when you put it like that …

When you put it like that you’re still wrong, not because consumers aren’t comparing your website to Amazon, Zappos, and Expedia (they are) but because Amazon’s, Zappos’, and Expedia’s customers aren’t paying attention to the technology.

They’re paying attention to the experience.

And even that’s wrong, because if they’re paying attention to the experience you’re either delivering it through VR goggles and the novelty hasn’t worn off; you run a cruise line, theme park, or some other business where the experience is what customers are paying for; or they’re having an experience bad enough to notice.

But for your average business that’s just trying to make an honest buck, the whole shopping and buying experience should be close to subliminal — as natural as the sales associate at a clothing retailer asking, when you’ve chosen a suit, whether you also need shirts or a belt.

Very little of this belongs to IT. My own inclination is to place every customer touchpoint under Marketing’s purview, or, if that isn’t possible, under its influence.

But just because IT doesn’t own customer experience design, that doesn’t mean IT is free and clear. Quite the contrary, IT has everything to do with making sure customers enjoy (that is, can ignore) the best experience possible when interacting with your business no matter which interaction channel is involved. Here’s a terribly incomplete checklist of what IT should bring to the customer-experience potluck:

Fundamentals

In any for-profit business, underneath all the complexity are customers, the products and services customers buy, and transactions through which customers buy products and services. IT had better provide solid support for these customer experience fundamentals:

  • CRM: Customer is semantically slippery. It includes the buyer, who makes or influences the decision to buy your products, consumers, who use them, and wallets, who pay for them; also there are both individual customers and composite entities they’re part of like households and business departments. CRM systems have customer data models designed to accommodate the complexity so you know who you’re talking with and in what capacity.
  • Product Information Management System (PIMS): Customers want to understand your products. Sure, general-purpose content management systems can handle product content, but why make life harder than it has to be? If your company sells a lot of SKUs and a PIMS isn’t part of your application portfolio, fix that.
  • Voice: Sure, digital stuff is fun and glitzy. But call centers and interactive voice response (IVR) are customer touchpoints too. Ignore them and the results are predictable and aren’t pretty.

Running with the pack

  • Analytics: Marketing needs a place to put its data and tools for analyzing it once it’s there. Not news. Not quite fundamental yet, but close: Companies that lack it are at a disadvantage more than companies that have it have an advantage.
  • Social media monitoring: Mining falls under analytics. But looking for individual messages that badmouth your company so you can respond in near-real time, before the message spreads too far? Not analytics, very important.
  • Customer Service monitoring: This should be a fundamental, except for how few companies do it. It’s low-tech, too. Your company’s customer service representatives know everything that’s wrong with every aspect of the customer experience, because Customer Service is where customers go to complain. Someone should listen to these folks, don’t you think?

Getting ahead … for now, at least

  • Chatbots: Sure, sure, right now chatbots are prone to smartphone spellcheck-caliber gaffes. But they’re going to be a big deal everywhere companies provide level-one support at scale for customers having problems, and not only to save a few bucks.
  • Less is more: Customer touchpoints aren’t for when a customer is lonely and wants company. They’re for when customers want to: Research a product; buy it; complain about it; return it, or complain about a different touchpoint. They want as few interactions as possible. Get rid of the ones that are annoyances if you possibly can.

I know there are more IT-driven get-ahead customer experience opportunities. I just can’t think of any right now.

How about you?

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