Why do you do things the way you do?
It could be that once upon a time, a bad thing happened and the process was designed to prevent it from happening again. Maybe it was designed to accommodate other systems or processes. Maybe that’s just how it’s always been done. But consider these questions:
- Is it the best way?
- Is it a modern way?
- Does it facilitate sharing of information?
- Does it provide real-time access?
- Is it easy to look at metrics and respond to issues, take advantage of opportunities, or adapt to changing conditions?
I’ve said before that technology years are like dog years and, baby, we’ve come a long way. It’s easier and easier to provide real-time access to information, to put what people need to make good decisions right in front of them, to automate, and to accelerate. If you’re not taking advantage of modern records management, why not? Imaging Office Systems is here to help you with that change.
Fear of change? People don’t “fear change”. What they fear is that they won’t be better off because of it, and that’s legitimate. Projects start but never finish, go over budget, toddle past deadlines and often when the project does close, the benefit is far less than expected.
Why do bad projects happen to good people?
I recently had a very frustrating experience with one of our vendors. We were starting a project and, working to ensure success, had outlined clear objectives for what we needed to accomplish, a roadmap on how to accomplish each one, and had identified areas for which we were looking for advice. This is what we do for a living after all so we had a plan. We had done our homework and we made sure everyone had the details well in advance of the first meeting. We were set to hit the ground running.
Except we didn’t. You saw this coming. It was like we were starting from zero. They weren’t prepared. Super…
We finally got back on track…after a few minutes.
Except we weren’t. Follow-up meeting and we’re starting all over. I couldn’t figure it out. This was important to us. We put in the time to make sure we got it right and still we weren’t making progress. We were going to have to drag this vendor along with us. It was infuriating and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what I found so frustrating. That is until, while doing a testimonial video with us, one of our clients said that working with IOS they felt like they were heard and that we were prepared to do business with them in the way they needed. They could ask for advice and the suggestions they got back were sound and worked for them.
Listening—on both sides—is the key to project success.
It’s like it all clicked for me. They felt like they were heard and that we were working with them. I didn’t believe our vendor was listening which translated to “we don’t care about this as much as you do” and I definitely didn’t feel like they were working with us. We weren’t a team.
We completed the project, but we had to roll that boulder all the way up the hill. We stuck with it because they’re good at what they do and we decided if we just made up for what was lacking we could get what we needed. It ended up being successful but it was way harder than it should have been and if we hadn’t made sure we added time and resources to fill in for the shortcomings, it would have failed.
That experience is how projects get a bad name but they don’t have to. If you have a solid plan and everyone’s in, it can be transformative. Want to see what it looks like when it goes right? Take a look.
Our people, our expertise, our ideas…working with you to challenge the status quo.