These days we hear a lot about analytics, metrics, data driven decision making and so-called big data. While the theory of making decisions based on data makes intuitive sense to most managers, it is challenging to know where to start from a practical standpoint.  Data collection and analysis can be very challenging and managers can consume copious amounts of time getting overwhelmed. In this post I provide a quick overview of the rationale for analytics followed by a set of practical steps to gather and use analytics to improve your business operations.

Kai What!?

Kaizen is Japanese for a philosophy of continuous improvement. After World War II this was implemented at several manufacturers in Japan as a way to boost the industrial production. It later made its way into the mainstream of business as part of Toyota Motor’s famed manufacturing system. At its core, Kaizen refers to a relentless pursuit of improvement in engineering, manufacturing and other business processes. The reasoning goes that by continually improving anything, just even a tiny bit every week, month or year, organizations reap huge rewards in the long run as a result of the compounding effect. In addition to the magic of compounding, it seems to me that the other secret to Kaizen’s success is its emphasis on incremental improvement. Because it is accepted for the improvements to be small by definition, they seem much more attainable and therefore often are attained. Sounds simple right? In fact it is not that difficult to implement Kaizen whether you call it that or just plain old continuous improvement as long as one crucial component is present: the ability to measure, to measure if a process, system, operation or team is getting better or worse along a certain dimension. And this is the crux of the matter. It is not that most managers or workers don’t aspire to improve the way they solve problems, deal with uncertain situations or gets rid of bottlenecks; it is just that they often cannot tell if things are in fact getting better! In the absence of this crucial feedback loop we can hardly expect managers or their teams to steer things in one direction or the other. And this is where simple understandable business analytics play a hugely important role.

Analytics Are Everywhere

If you ever watched the movie “Moneyball”, you’d see the importance of analytics, numbers and data to any operation, even to the success of a baseball team. Yes, it sounds bizarre that a game with endless variables can be predicted and improved but this can be done and is now common practice for all major sports teams. Or how about Nate Silver – this was the guy who predicted the outcome of the 2012 U.S. presidential election correctly for every state! I will not even attempt to explain the methods he used for his pinpoint accuracy, but he did it with analyzing and tracking statistics.

The Road to Success is Paved with Tracking and Analysis

Constant improvement is a formidable challenge for any manager. But this is especially true for those who oversee distributed operations involving multiple job sites, plants, facilities, people and equipment. Examples of these folks include industrial operations managers, facilities construction managers and equipment field service managers. Analyzing and tracking issues to see where the reoccurring problems are, where the bottlenecks are and where the bulk of the expenses lie is even more difficult for this breed of managers when their operations are strewn across vast distances, even multiple time zones. For these folks it is not easy to hold regular meetings with staff or personally walk around and get an overall sense of their operations as it would be perhaps for a manager overseeing a group of office workers housed in the same building pushing bits and bytes around. As one example, for a plant manager, a trivial yet recurring production issue on the plant floor may be a top contributor to production costs. For a field service manager an issue with a poorly designed cable harness or connector may turn out to be the root cause of a large proportion of customer complaint cases. But how would these managers become aware of these seemingly mundane issues taking place out there away from the HQ? Without consistent data collection, organization and analytics bringing these little facts to their awareness, they are at best relying on hearsay and anecdotal evidence which is often skewed by people’s perceptions and biases.

As a manager wouldn’t it be great to know exactly how your business units are doing, how your teams are doing, and whether the operations are improving? You might say: we have weekly meetings to catch up on our progress and operations and as far as I can tell if we are improving by looking at the financials at the end of the month. Everything looks groovy, but underneath the high level numbers, a lot of rich, subtle detail is yet to be uncovered, analyzed and put into action improving your performance. This is the world of analytics.

How to Get Analytics to Work for You not Against You

Based on our experience of developing and deploying analytics below are some key recommendations to help you implement and leverage analytics to improve your team’s performance without getting mired in a ‘data :

a) Pick the right high level metrics: A good way to think about this is to imagine your operation, your team, your plant as your favorite muscle car, now imagine which three gauges you would absolutely want to have on the instrument panel? And I am not talking about the obvious revenue-in, expenses-out. These would be the equivalent of the speedometer or electronic compass. They give you an overall sense of where you are headed and how fast you are moving, which are important but they don’t really give you actionable insights: things you can actually do to improve things. When thinking about metrics you want to dig a bit deeper below the surface and think of indicators or warning lights you want to have in plain sight to tell you and your team what’s happening inside the engine. From our experience talking to customers and developing such metrics in context to our Scoop platform, we homed in on three primary metrics: volume of issues by category, issue closure speed and team-wide activity. When selecting your ‘gauges’ it pays to be a minimalist. Like a busy instrument panel that distracts a driver and fails to convey the main signals, too many metrics to monitor and improve also makes it difficult for managers to benefit from analytics.

b) Collect the necessary raw data and keep it coming: to light up those gauges we talked about, you need the right electrical signals to be collected and fed into them. Likewise to present the right analytics to managers, the right underlying data needs to be collected out there in your operations. This is largely a function of two elements: tools and training. The right information technology is needed to allow collection of the data at the place and time when the action is taking place. For instance if the data is related to a service call, the technician needs to have a handy, easy to use tool to document different aspects of the call such as type of equipment, type of issue, images of the faulty component and the like. If the tool he is using is not accessible at the service site e.g., because it runs only on his laptop and which is not convenient to fire up on the spot or requires a WiFi connection that is not available at the time, or doesn’t enforce collection of the right data fields etc. then the process begins to break down. Some people will collect the right data, some won’t, some intend to collect it but forget and other reasons abound. Now, although the right IT tool is a necessary component it is not on its own sufficient. You still need to train the people and this is not just training in the sense of steps to use to operate the IT tool but also a cultural adjustment to a metrics collecting, metrics driven organization.

c) Ensure your data has structure: one of the primary challenges faced by industry today is what is referred to as ‘big data’. Despite its somewhat positive sounding name, this is basically a big hot mess. Thousands of Terrabytes of data is being collected by organizations around the world every day. Most of this data has little or no structure. Examples include–you guessed it, email, documents, image and video archives that are not organized or sorted in any specific way and simply get stuffed into data warehouses and backup archives. As you can imagine, it is very difficult to draw reliable conclusions from a collection of emails or a huge blob of files. In our service manager example, it would be very difficult if not impossible for her to sift through thousands of emails and documents exchanged by her team in the past quarter. So when it comes to data collection, it pays to choose a tool that guides the data along the right pipes and sorts it into the right buckets from the get-go. A number of electronic form-based systems (including our own Scoop platform) accomplish this by allowing users to gather a minimum set of data fields and then storing these in a relational database. Additional fields can be introduced over time to add to the richness of the data collected. The end result is that the data is much easier to analyze, sort, filter and use to drive actionable conclusions.

d) Use analytics to form theories then test & repeat: of course all of the data collection, summarization and presentation is useless if it doesn’t inspire action, action to change things for the better. Taking a methodical, measured approach to using analytics is important. It is important to remember that the gauges are just reflections of what is actually happening in your operations not the absolute truth. Therefore you want to use the metrics provided to first form a theory or ideally a number of theories about what is causing a certain change in your business. For instance if you are seeing a large volume of issues related to a specific model of the equipment your team installs in the field, you don’t want to jump to conclusions and blame the problem on the equipment-that’s just one theory. You also want to form a number of other theories about the root cause of the problem including installation procedure, level of training and other potential causes. Then use the existing data or collect additional data to rule in or rule out each theory.

What type of analytics and tracking systems have you used to monitor and improve your operations? What are the pros and cons?

About the Author: Babak Sardary is a veteran of field engineering and founder of Trusterra Technologies. Trusterra develops the Scoop™ mobile software platform helping thousands of users in distributed teams record, alert, collaborate and resolve issues across field and office.

These days we hear a lot about cloud computing, mobile technologies, tablets, apps…What do these technologies really mean to operations managers, field project managers, plant managers and the like?  Based on many conversations with folks in these fields we make the case that these are not only useful technologies from a practical standpoint but quite vital to the health and competitiveness of many operations moving forward.

Taking Notes

The most interesting part of a work week for me is when I get to have one-on-one conversations with customers.  In most cases these are the people who manage projects, run operations and oversee plants and facilities at large industrial companies including those in HVAC, Oil & Gas, Infrastructure Development, Construction and Manufacturing.  Listening to these folks you feel the sheer weight of the very real challenges and issues they face on a daily basis.  It is a tall order to get ahead of project delays, solve complex issues in the field and at plants, manage relationships with customers and partners, hire, train and retain talented people and in the middle of this find time to grow a career and a family.

Most of what we hear in these conversations ends up in hand-written or typed up notes.  These notes are not particularly easy to digest and don’t tell the story in a big picture way. So recently we spent some time trying to come up with a format to summarize what we had learned.  Our aim was to not just communicate the problems and challenges but try to visualize how technology could help address these. Particularly we felt it was worthwhile to draw lines between the challenges faced by operations managers and two major technology categories that have appeared on the scene in a big way in the last 5 years, namely cloud computing and mobile technologies (see further down for a quick intro to these, more in upcoming posts).

At first we created a “mindmap” using Mircrosoft Visio which is a technical diagramming tool. Then we thought, this is very detailed and has lots of nuances which is great if you have lots of time to study it but it is not very friendly to look at.  So then we took another step back and came up with a higher level picture which preserves some of the detail but is not overwhelming. We then morphed it into a blackboard diagram to emphasize it as an evolving picture (since you can always wipe things off the board and re-draw which is by the way what we hope to do based on your feedback).

The result is basically a diagram that shows a series of links between the needs of operations managers (at the top) progressing gradually and connecting to the technology capabilities now available thanks to cloud and mobile.

Cloud + Mobile: in a nutshell

To round out the references I made to these terms in the above, I thought to include a quick overview of these important technologies.  My hope is that I can expand on these in future posts particularly on best practices and tips relating to their application in industrial settings.

• Cloud: or cloud computing refers to the use of computing resources e.g., use of hardware and/or software delivered over the Internet as opposed to the old way when customers had to have the stuff (h/w and s/w) installed on-permise. In cloud computing, customers use the end result i.e., the final utility delivered by the computing resources much like they use electricity without having to install and maintain their own power generator. Cloud computing lets customers shift the burden of capital investment in computers and software as well as the ongoing maintenance of these resources over to the service provider. For more on this see this page on wikipedia

• Mobile: in this post by mobile we mean the (amazing) mobile telecommunication devices such as smart phones and tablets that first made their debut in the consumer market creating a rich ecosystem of apps and customers. Increasingly these devices are finding their foothold in businesses and in many ways transforming how things are done.

How Do Cloud+Mobile Change Things?

From the conversations we have had (on which the above diagram is based) it is clear that given the nature of work in asset intensive industries (distributed, remote, detailed, time sensitive, …) cloud and mobile will play a pivotal role in improving the performance of operations managers and their teams, letting them reduce hassles, delays and non-value add tasks.  These technologies can be counted on to essentially shrink the time-space barriers between people, issues and the information that they need to solve them while centralizing and organizing information in a hyper accessible way (i.e., right in your pocket)  The array of on-board sensors that mobile devices offer (camera, microphone, touch-sensitive screen, GPS,…) provides a great way for field teams to continuously feed real time information back to the rest of the organization,something that was not practical 4 years ago if you had to take a picture, download it from your camera, upload it to your laptop, build an email around it, find a connection to send it…sorry too late!  The issue based architecture for collaboration (as opposed to haphazard communication through phone, email etc.) and associated abilities to tag and track issues provides a “just-right” level of organization to allow management to see the trees in the forest of field data, identify common issues and patterns and be able to extract actionable insights from data that was previously simply archived and forgotten about.  While I realize this is not strictly a mobile or cloud technology, the issue-focused approach to organizing work and communication becomes significantly more practical with the introduction of mobile and cloud so this was why I decided to include it in the diagram.

Clearly the map above can be further detailed by “specializing” the ideas put forward, particularly those in the middle area.  For example although all operations managers and project managers need to reduce costs, increase revenues, achieve better customer satisfaction, etc. an operations manager in Oil & Gas will see the particular ways to achieve this in (at least a slightly) different way than his counterpart in Automotive Manufacturing.

My hope is that this Mind Map can serve as a conversation starter and that we can use feedback from more and more of you to make it better.

Let us know your thoughts!  Are there specific needs/goals/wants that are missing on the left hand side?
Please let us hear your thoughts and feedback via the comment section below.

About the Author: Babak Sardary is a veteran of field engineering and founder of Trusterra Technologies. Trusterra develops the Scoop™ mobile software platform helping thousands of users in distributed teams record, alert, collaborate and resolve issues across field and office.

There are thousands of operation managers out there in different industries working in HVAC, oil & gas, construction, system integration… you get the idea.  Though they run the show at vastly different verticals and industry sectors, in fact they share many similarities.  According to Wikipedia “Operations management is an area of management concerned with overseeing, designing, and controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production of goods and/or services.”   So in a nutshell these are the people who translate a company’s strategy into tactics to effectively deliver the goods and services the company is known for. We thought that was kind of important, wouldn’t you say?  So recently we ran a quick poll asking OM’s the question: “What are the top issues and problems you face as an operations manager?” A little research along with the responses and here is the list of the top 5 we have gathered:
 

1.       People

Dealing with underlings and finding self-sufficient people to handle the job without supervision is repeatedly reported as a major challenge.  It is predicted that the  “big crew change” phenomenon whereby a large swath of the workforce (boomers) is retiring and a new wave (millennials/gen y) is entering the workforce is expected to take this challenge to a whole new level. Hiring qualified workers to replace Bob who has been working for 30 years and brain dumping all that rich expertise into young Brandon’s head who has a college degree but no actual work experience is a challenge and half for many companies.  This change of guard is seen across all industries and starting to loom larger as a major concern.

Leading, finding the right employees, and managing these people becomes a constant battle for OMs and can be extremely time consuming which is why we listed this as the number one challenge.  Key enablers mentioned in this regard include: taking a proactive approach to attracting and retaining quality new hires, implementing effective on-the-job mechanisms to transfer knowledge and retaining the older experts for as long as possible.

2.       Communication

How often do you encounter issues falling through the cracks and it seems like the people that should be on top of something are either not brought into the loop on time or are missing information they need to make quality decisions. Important emails, conversations, and documents are sent but do they really find their way to the right people at the right time?

Many operation managers we speak to complain about the blame game and finger pointing while issues remain unresolved and delays pile up. Another common concern is when critical decisions are made without a superior’s knowledge and input leading to less than optimal outcomes or worse safety incidents.  Of course OM’s don’t want to spend time on every decision but ideally like to see the stream of information in their “peripheral vision” and jump in and inject their input at the right time.

What compounds the issue is the notion that communication seems like it should be simple.  Just send me an email, give me a call and record it in that spreadsheet on the network.  But to be effective communication requires a well-designed and thought-through set of protocols and enabling tools.  Lack of a systematic approach and continued use of ad-hoc methods leads to serious issues especially at larger organizations: delayed or non-reporting of issues, costly delays, excessive field travel, issues turning into crises, loss of good will with customers…which bring us to the next point.

3.       Money In, Money Out

How do I increase the volume of incoming business and therefore revenues? What do I need to do to keep my operations costs in check without sacrificing customer satisfaction and quality?  Many operation managers and project managers find themselves in highly a competitive global marketplace.  Sub-par financial performance used to mean not getting that christmas bonus; now increasingly it is a matter of survival for organizations competing with companies a world away they’d never heard of 10 years ago.  Many operation managers and project managers are grappling with this challenge and urgently looking for systematic yet practical ways to accomplish both revenue increase and cost reduction.

4.       Change Management

Having to contend with unexpected and unplanned events seems a daily adventure for operation managers.  Imagine working in an environment where everything goes as planned and each process is executed flawlessly without any interruption. Now shake your head and come back to the reality of operations management – virtually all OM’s we spoke to cited this as a constant battle.  Changes in project scope/requirements, personnel and other parameters is unavoidable.  It really comes down to how you manage this change.

When you dig below the surface, successful change management seems to come down to at least three key elements: planning, information, and focused collaboration.  Basically, organizations need to have a plan and a protocol in place outlining the process and chain of command to deal with changes encountered in the field, at a plant etc.  They also need to equip the soldiers with the appropriate tools to document, depict and describe the change in a timely and efficient manner.  And lastly provide the means to to get the right people (see protocol) involved in a collaborative decision making process armed with the details of the issue from step 1.  It sounds simple but in practice without the right tools this can quickly unravel as each person interprets their own ways of implementing the protocol.

5.       Effecting Transformation

Organizations, individuals, ingrained ways of doing things are kind of like a load  of bricks ~ very hard to push around!  Operations managers who want to introduce innovative ways of doing things are faced with the task of overcoming this inertia.  Imagine you are an operations manager, you are trying to do your day job (with not-so-perfect people and processes) at the same time you are trying to introduce brand new ways of doing things to a range of people: some enthusiastic and many who will downright fight you all the way.   This can quickly become disheartening!  No wonder so many such programs fall by the wayside.

Talking to operations managers and project managers who have successfully effected change, it seems a common set of parameters enable them get change through.  These include: clear objectives, phased approach, internal champions and choice of vendors.  So you have to have a plan and clear set of objectives.  Cannot expect any project to succeed without setting goals.  How would you know you got there or not otherwise?  The best way to do this of course is to keep it simple and use a few key quantifiable (and reasonably achievable) metrics as goal posts.  Then take a phased approach i.e., don’t try to bite too much at first, keep it reasonable and build momentum.  And last but definitely not least understand that to accomplish change you need passionate people.  This is often that right hand guy/gal that the operations manager can rely on to evangelize, encourage and cajole people and deal with the day to day tasks of getting change to take hold.   The same type of people are needed on the outside.  Some operations manager tell us that they often don’t select brand name or large vendors instead deciding to work with new, disruptive players who themselves are in the process of bringing about change in the industry.  These vendors have a strong vested interest in helping you as a proof point for their technology and therefore much more likely to spend time with you.

I understand the issues I have listed are more or less horizontal i.e. they run across industries. They can mean at least slightly different things depending on your line of business. My sense is that though these themes are in fact much more common than not and many of the same practices can help operations professionals in various industries.  Would love to hear your thoughts!

SNEAK PEEK: we are working on an upcoming post where we will relate the top goals and needs of operation managers to a set of capabilities and best practices ( many of which we have built into the Scoop Platform)  For now, we’d love to hear your specific ideas on challenges you see for operation managers in your particular industry. What other issues are you facing? – let me know here or comment in the LinkedIn discussion!

About the Author: Jeff Huang handles the Marketing and Business Development for Trusterra – Scoop App. Trusterra develops the Scoop™ mobile software platform helping thousands of users in distributed teams record, alert, collaborate and resolve issues across field and office.

John started work with Greenleaf Press Co. last month as a field support tech. So far he likes his new position and gets along well with the rest of the crew.  His only real complaint so far would be the uneasy feeling that he just doesn’t have the depth of training he would like, when it comes to Greenleaf’s machines. These are complex printing presses and the even though he has gone through the 6-week technician training, there is just too much detail to keep in one’s head.  He is musing about this on his drive back from the last service call when he gets dispatched to a major customer plant.  There has been a stoppage in the middle of a newsprint cycle.  He walks into the plant and is quickly guided over to the ailing machine.  John opens the control cabinet and notices several warning lights flashing.  He tries a few basic routines he has picked up to restart the machine but no luck!  Time is ticking and with only 3 hours left to the print deadline John’s got to come up with a solution and fast!

John may not be a real person but this kind of scenario is and by no means unique to industrial machinery.  It happens thousands of times a day across a variety of industries: a construction project manager notices a structure is not built to spec, a refinery field engineer notices a major deficiency during a walk-through, an HVAC installer is puzzled by the plumbing configuration at a new job site…

The fact is everyday field workers come across issue and situations that need to be decided and solved quickly often under time pressure and often when these folks are isolated from the rest of their team.  In the absence of quality and timely advice from their peers, seniors and managers, workers can make poor quality decisions that adversely affect customer and project outcomes or worse yet result in serious safety incidents.

So for someone like John what determines the decision to get help or to go solo?

The factors may seem complex and dependent on the specifics of each case but in my experience they can be categorized into three categories:

• Availability: if I decide to get help, what are my chances of engaging the right resources?
• Speed: if I can reach the right people, how fast can I explain the problem & get a solution?
• Perception: if I reach out to get help, how would I be perceived by my colleagues and management?

These factors are affected by the choice of tools and technologies available in the given organization but also by the type of culture that governs interactions.

Below are a number of practices to use to help promote an efficient and healthy collaboration atmosphere focused on efficient problem solving:

1. Formulated Judgement: a culture that recognizes and balances the value of taking initiative with the importance of recognizing when one is over one’s head on a given issue is key. However the culture without clear guidelines is not enough.  Establish guidelines (ideally written) and train your people to recognize the signs to make a call one way or the other. In one of my past companies we came up with a score-based system including checklists.
2. Recognize Goals and Assists: when a customer issue is resolved or an ingenious solution to a tough project issue is proposed, make sure you explicitly ask for and recognize not just the lead but also the contributors.
3. Select the Right Tool: the importance of using the right IT tools cannot be overemphasized.  In a distributed team environment you have people and issues strewn across work sites, offices and time zones.  A nerve system is needed to connect people and make them available to one another.  Once you establish availability, the communication platform needs to take into account the unique needs and pressures of people working in the field.

For a description of the attributes of such a nerve system have a look at my previous post titled: Field Team Coordination Can Be Simple

Please let us hear your thoughts and feedback via the comment section below.

About the Author: Babak Sardary is a veteran of field engineering and founder of Trusterra Technologies. Trusterra develops the Scoop™ mobile software platform helping thousands of users in distributed teams record, alert, collaborate and resolve issues across field and office.

Imagine a large team of engineers, technicians, field workers, vendors and clients strewn across a wide metropolitan area working on a highway project.  Or a similar team building and integrating a complex multi-module oil refining facility.

When it comes to distributed teams, coordination takes on a whole new  dimension. It becomes an even more interesting problem for teams dealing with field work on machines, equipment, structures and other physical things–subject matter that is not easy to transport, email, ship and show to others.

Coordinating the work of these individuals is no mean feat.  For even a medium sized infrastructure project it can easily take a platoon of project managers, coordinators, field inspectors and others to just keep the data on issues and work progress mildly up to date.  The sad part is that after all this effort, the vast majority of the data collected simply gets archived at the project office, never seeing the light of day and finding its way to the actual people who would benefit from it.

Legacy methods of team coordination (paper-based, manual processes) are a huge drain on  resources and leave numerous opportunities for waste, delays and mistakes.   At the root of their shortcomings is a common element: they fail to remove the barriers in space and time between the information in the field and the people who need them most.  Without timely access to pertinent  information field workers cannot send / receive the often small yet significant signals (input, advice or support) needed for others to make decisions, resolve issues and in  general move the project ahead.  These effects are cumulative and therefore a great deal of success and  failure of field projects depends on removing these barriers and achieving a fully-coordinated team (you see when you get rid of time and space  differences between team members and what each of them knows you achieve coordination)

Sounds  simple enough right?  Well in fact it is simple as long as the right tools and approaches are  employed.

To achieve real time team coordination in the field, the collaboration tool you use must possess these attributes:

1. Must be designed for and aligned (religiously) with mobile worker needs: because field people work differently and face different pressures than those sitting in an air-conditioned office with a big monitor and full-sized keyboard.
2. Must be issue-centric to provide self-organization of information: because email and phone and excel sheets create mucho chaos and it is a full time job to coral them.
3. Must allow for asynchronous even offline communication and contribution (work-shifting): because our schedules are harder to mesh each day and because we’d rather finish up tending to those pesky issues on the plane ride back from the field (rather than watching Mars Needs Moms and drinking a lukewarm beer)  That way we can have more family/personal time when we land.
4. Must allow for symmetric communication across organizations:  Because we increasingly work with colleagues across other organizations and a system that takes 2 requisition forms and 3 signatures to give an outside contractor access just won’t be practical.

So you see, the tools we use don’t need be complicated with a million features and charts and graphs that trip us over.  They just need to observe some basic philosophies.

This focus on human-friendly communication and simplicity forms the basis of our Scoop platform.  Check out the Scoop tour for more information or simply start your free trial.

Please let us hear your thoughts and feedback via the comment section below.

About the Author:  Babak Sardary is a veteran of field engineering and founder of Trusterra Technologies.  Trusterra develops the Scoop™ mobile software platform helping thousands of users in distributed teams record, alert, collaborate and resolve issues across field and office.

Let’s face it.  Downtime in the field is atrociously expensive. All manner of business owners from construction, to survey firms to system integrators spend a ton of time on saving a few thousand dollars per year on equipment, office supplies, services etc. etc. only to lose it by the bucketful over delays, mistakes and downtime in the field.  Just think of the cost of all those people and equipment sitting idle waiting for someone to make a decision or figure out how to solve a problem. Last Friday afternoon we were chatting about this here at the office and so of course someone broke out the spreadsheet and started crunching the numbers based on our the experience around the table. So here’s the thing, what we found shocked even us!…

Basically the calculations showed that a field team of 30 could save over $1M/year if they follow some pretty basic communication practices.  I plan to flesh this out more and and post it in a future blog entry but for now here are the practices we compiled to effect this whopping savings:

1. Ensure issues are reported when they happen (not 2 hours later, not 2 days later)
2. Have the report be accompanied with a complete description (hint: a phone call/email is not enough)
3. Get the right people for that issue or decision involved from the get-go.
4. Find a central place for discussion and keep all data for future reference (it’ll happen again)
5. Make it possible for people to contribute to the solution on their own time (meetings are not very productive & don’t produce the best solutions when it comes to this sort of thing)

Please let us hear your thoughts and feedback via the comment section below.

About the Author:  Babak Sardary is a veteran of field engineering and founder of Trusterra Technologies.  Trusterra develops the Scoop™ mobile software platform helping thousands of users in distributed teams record, alert, collaborate and resolve issues across field and office.