How Should it Really Look?

by Neil I. Clark

There is a simple way to take control of your job: paint an ideal picture of it. If you can describe how it should look if everything ran absolutely perfectly, you will have a good picture of where you are heading.

This perfect picture may never be achieved, of course, but by describing it in detail, you enhance your ability to achieve your overall objective. You have to know what it should look like in order to evaluate situations that come up from time to time, and to make the right decisions along the way.

In describing your "perfect world", don’t hold back. Don’t paint it less than perfect, just because it would seem unreal. If you are responsible for billing and collections, for instance, the ideal picture may be that all clients always pay their bills within the 30 days required on the invoice. Ok, so in the real world that may never happen, but in the perfect world, that’s the way it should work.

Another part of your function may be the issuing of bills, and if this area worked perfectly, it could be described as: "All bills issued on-time with correct billing addresses and with no mistakes on the item list". Sure, you say, but there’s always a mistake or two in the billing process. But it doesn’t matter how it is now, write it down as it should be if everything ran perfectly.

When you have described the way in which it would all work, if done perfectly, you should have a document that is anything from a paragraph to a half a page in length. You don’t need to write a book on it, but you do need to cover your whole function and how each part of it would look when done to perfection.

At this point, you not only have an excellent working document, against which you can evaluate your future decisions and direction, you also have the key to improving things.

How? Just look at your perfect picture description, and then compare it to the real world. Note where it differs and you have the areas to focus on. If, in the above example, you see that some people don’t pay their bills on time, maybe there’s something you can do about that. For example, you might institute a follow-up system to call people a week or so before their bill is due, just to ensure that they have actually received it and that there is no dispute.

The key factor here is that, having described how things should work in a perfect world, it is easy to spot where they are not now perfect. And from this, you know what areas need to be improved. Anything that moves you closer to the perfect world you have described must, of course, improve your results.