When it doesn’t go to plan
How many times have you stood on the sidelines waiting for a service to go live, only to find that the lack of someone else’s planning has suddenly become your emergency?
What makes good service delivery is the ability to anticipate the number of outcomes from an approach or action, but what makes it a success is having a plan for each of the outcomes – that way nothing appears as a surprise and catches you out.
We are all driven by pleasure and pain (more of that later) – pleasure is doing a good job, receiving the satisfaction that what you offer is complete and is fit for purpose. Through this you find you ‘nail’ delivery on time and within expectations which leaves you to go on and do other things.
Whereas pain is what you feel when it all goes wrong and the adrenaline kicks in – driving you to fix it or bringing back the service as soon as possible. This approach means everything stops, everybody gets involved where the drive is to either re-work or fix what has happened – meaning losing time and resources on what you had planned next.
What is the right approach? What is the right answer? It is difficult to answer until you start focusing on why you are doing this?
There are a number of reasons: Better life, make money, provide an improved service, create new opportunities or for growth – there are many more …
Ultimately those who make the process difficult may be on the wrong page, they may not completely understand the end goal or the ethos by which we measure ourselves or we may be in the ‘wrong job’ – some organisation tick along slowly expecting a low level of service and response, where others are driven by growth and improvement – being much more engaging and progressive.
What ever you do – for planned actions or approaches – undertake a period of early due diligence and risk assessment of all possible outcomes – you may even surprise yourself when something does go wrong and you end up say ‘I anticipated that and this is what we planned to do next … ‘.
Photo credit: sara | b. / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND