Building Crystal Palaces
by Jonathan McGaha | 2 June 2014 12:00 am
There’s a rhythm to business. About 80 to 90 percent of what we do is repeatable. Just as with professional sports teams, our teams get into predictable movements, and it is only when they encounter a bad play, a new defense or a rule change that they get out of sorts.
We experienced one of those times recently. We were uploading a bunch of material off CDs and DVDs to a server, trying to be as efficient in our process as possible, and only later saw that something we had uploaded contained a virus. All of the work we did had to be repeated and, of course, we needed to firewall that section of the server to keep the virus from spreading. It was a mess, and required the full efforts of a team of people to solve quickly. We probably lost two days of time and effort.
I guess we could have developed a process that would have allowed us to scan every one of those disks prior to uploading it, but that would have taken a person an extra day to accomplish, which would have been fully half the amount of time lost from the virus. Plus, we’ve been doing this process for years and this is the first time we’ve encountered this problem. So, should we change our process now that it’s happened to account for the difficulty we encountered? My answer is no; let me explain why.
I encounter contractors and other people in business all the time who spend massive amounts of effort trying to foresee every possible problem and then create a system to protect themselves against it. Often the size of the problem could be miniscule, but the creation of the system can be all-consuming.
These people are creating crystal palaces when all they really need is a pretty decent barn. Another way to think about it is that they spend too much time planning and not enough time doing. There comes a point when you just have to push forward and manage the consequences. I think it would be great to have systems that protect us from all the potentially bad things that can happen, but I think the smarter solution is to develop business processes that are flexible enough to change so when you do encounter a problem, you can adapt the process to it.
Now, I’m not calling for headlong rushes without any planning. That would be silly. But the reality is that with experience we can anticipate most of the problems we’ll encounter. An experienced roofer can look at an existing structure and have a pretty good idea what he’s going to encounter when he tears off the old roof. Every once in a while, he’ll be surprised to find some nut has framed the roof in a completely unique way, but planning your business around that particular occurrence will put you out of business.
What I’m encouraging you to do is rely on your experience. Sure, you’re going to encounter problems. But trying to anticipate every problem will paralyze you.
Source URL: https://www.metalconstructionnews.com/articles/building-crystal-palaces/