Don’t Shoot From The Hip

Controls

A great post by Miki Saxon on the Leadership Turn blog titled; Leaders Should NOT Be Cowboys.

Whether it’s just you, or one, ten, fifty, or more employees, whether full time, part time or virtual, you need viable processes to keep you focused

I echo Miki’s sentiment, too often growing businesses perceive that instituting financial and other controls is too time consuming, or too bureaucratic.

That perception can lead to wasted time putting out fires as everything arrives at the leaders desk. Rather than worrying about your business, you are worrying about that shipment, or that invoice.

Those processes and controls are the tools you use to measure, and to manage your people, and their work.

At its simplest, without those controls and processes, you have no way to measure your business. and what cannot be measured, cannot be managed. 

Miki has a list of the corporate controls that any growing business needs at the executive level, but let me add some operational controls and measurements that you should be demanding from your IT staff or suppliers;

* Approval process for all IT expenditures, no matter how minor

* Number, type, and severity of IT service requests and IT service outages

* Time required to complete service requests, or repair IT service outages

* Fully loaded cost of supporting all IT assets and services

* Number, type, and status of all IT assets and services being managed 

The SMB Takeaway

It is a lot easier to bake in these measurements and controls from the beginning, than to try and bolt them on later.

Later probably being when everything is riding off the rails.

(As a manager in the SME space, if you have not found and bookmarked Miki’s blog yet – go and do it now!)

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Photo Credit jspad via flickr