The key for productivity at Bruce Rasmussen’s Carpe Diem Consulting is a combination of technology and discipline.
First to the technology. It’s all cloud based and that, according to Rasmussen, makes an enormous difference to productivity.
It also has a lot to do with personal style.
“It all starts with you as an individual. If you’re a procrastinator or you hurry things and get it wrong, then it’s going to be hard for the business to be productive,’’ Rasmussen says.
“We are all great advocates of the system of doing the important before it become urgent and if it’s not important, then don’t do it
“With technology, I introduced a rule that says do those two or three important things you have to get done during the day and then worry about email.
“Unless you have the personal under control, anything the company tries to do is irrelevant. That’s the philosophy we wrap around it all. As a small business obviously the cloud based services, every single system we use is hosted in the cloud, everything from Dropbox to Skype.”
One consultant there even does business development activity using Pinterest. That’s much more efficient than getting approvals and printing out proposals which are out of date in next to no time.
That in itself creates efficiencies and allows closer interaction with customers. It frees up the company to focus on what’s important.
“I don’t think I can run my company the way I do without a cloud based server,’’ he says. “We don’t have a physical server. Everything we do is hosted. Customers can interface with us. The productivity increases even when you compare it to email for small firms like ourselves where we bill out our time and we are often onsite with a customer, it’s really important.”
Carpe Diem uses technology to modify behaviour to drive productivity.
Rasmussen says: “We have an online system that’s a time measuring thing so with every task that our consultants do, there is a number of categories and everything they do they have click and fill in online. It’s very easy. You can think you’re working hard and adding extra value to a customer but you’re really just doing a lot of work for them that’s not billed. We found the discipline around measuring how people spend their time. We have KPIs around consultant utilisation and we have KPIs around how much we should be spending on pre-sales
“So we get little email alerts from the system. If there’s a $25,000 job and we’re charging $2500 a day, we should only be spending 10 days as the absolute maximum to do it so it starts to send us warnings when we get up to 65 per cent or 75 per cent.”
“It’s not just the report it sticks out, it’s a proactive tool so you can set it up to send alerts when things are going off the rails.”
As he says, it’s a critical tool for creating productivity-focused behaviour in a company filled with project managers, systems architects and consultants. He notes Carpe Diem also puts a lot of focus on the value chain around sales and service. Every part of the process is important.
“Even though we’re a very small organisation, we are really rigorous around our sales process. Often we find people overlook that as well. They have technical people but they’ve never trained them on how do you interact with a customer. You can lose a lot of efficiency. You have to teach skills around assertiveness and saying no to a customer. “If you walk into any organisation that has a lot of projects and a lot of project managers, you might have really expert people in their craft who they don’t know how to deal with customers.
“What happens is you might have 20 developers onsite building a new system for the customer and the customer might come up and say: ‘While you’re here can you do this for us’ and because they are all really nice people and brought up to think that part of customer service is servitude they just do it but at the end of the day that will mean there’s either a budget blowout or scope creep.
“If they don’t have those skills you are not going to be able to run projects efficiently because customers are always trying to extract that extra piece from you. They have to learn how to say no, they have to learn how to deliver the bad news.”
Real productivity, he says, comes from starting with the end in mind. “At the end of the day what are you trying to achieve, and you work backwards from there,’’ he says. “Then there’s only two things to do. You’ve got to look within that process to make sure it’s happening as efficiently as possible but without losing the end goal. But once you have each block right, we have to make sure the interface is proper.”
TAKEAWAY
Run better meetings, create more targeted reporting lines, make sure there is proper follow through and delegate better
Think strategically. What exactly do they need to tackle to become more productive? They need to work out their objectives, and communicate these down the line.
Develop an active management system to monitor productivity.
Look at the service or product in terms of the value stream, that is to say, all the steps that are taken to deliver it to the customer. That means looking at every step the company takes from raw materials to finished goods to get that product to the customer.
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