Your company is doing well, seeing growth and making money. It does so in spite of some known, but ignored, issues. No one really feels pain at present, right? So why implement any performance improvement initiatives? There is no “burning platform.” Let’s walk through these scenarios…
Sometime in the future, you instinctively know, one or more issues will become a noticeable pain. Continuing to ignore an issue no longer works (we call it “taking mental Tylenol”). You may see:
- Rising customer complaints
- Orders shipping late
Once the “mental Tylenol” effect wears off, people start to pay attention. It could take a year or more before you see:
- Invoicing errors that delay DSO
- Quality declining
Finally, management takes action to recover. They call it performance improvement. But, is it? We don’t think so. Eventually, you likely will come across:
- Processes that cannot scale
- Rising staff attrition
Let’s take a look at this scenario. Today your company is performing at a certain level (profitability, sales volume, net promoter score, etc.).
- Let’s index that and say we are at 100
- The problem we ignore for a year drags us down 15% to 85
- Your management team says they can improve by 20% next year, which brings us to 102
In our books, that’s NOT a performance improvement, it’s only a recovery (102 vs 100). What if we decided not to wait? To get started now?
- We’re at the same starting point as above 100
- We implement the same improvement plan (20%), which takes us to 120
- A year later that continuing improvement gets us to an index of 144
What did waiting cost you? By doing nothing, things get worse and you’ll experience:
- Incurred further declines in performance (85 vs 100)
- Get less ROI to address the issue (and the effort and cost to remediate is likely higher)
- Likely hurt your customers more
- Managing by reaction instead of by anticipation.
Isn’t that 42-point difference after two years attractive? Even half of it?
For more information on how BT Partners can help you act now to implement performance improvement initiatives, contact our Managed IT Services team.
