Use Mistakes to Your Firm’s Advantage
PILAR CASTRO-KILTZ, CEO & THOMAS BOYER, ASSOCIATE
More than just a tool, an Issue Tracker is a critical cultural shift that empowers your teams, leverages the experiences at every layer of your organization, and de-stigmatizes mistakes, transforming them into opportunities for understanding, learning, and improvement.
HOW ISSUE TRACKING CAN IMPROVE EFFICIENCY & ACCOUNTABILITY
In operations, the concept of identifying the “bottleneck” is a key factor when it comes to improving efficiencies. The bottleneck is the slowest moving component or process step within a system. There is always a bottleneck in a process (one step is always “the slowest”); however, when these delays at the bottleneck and beyond become severe, a firm becomes less efficient. Costs and risk exposure increase, while revenues and productivity drop.
To illustrate, let’s look at the simple example of a sandwich assembly line. A company makes ham and cheese sandwiches where one individual is needed for each of the three actions - slicing, assembling, and packaging. If slicing and assembling are moving at the same rate but packaging takes twice as long, then packaging is the bottleneck. Assembled sandwiches might pile up while waiting to be packaged. Customers may complain that their sandwiches are taking too long, but the shop owner may not immediately know why production has slowed.
How might one go about finding the bottleneck? And once identified, how could a firm determine what problem is causing the bottleneck to then solve it?
One option is a system for tracking problems, errors, and inefficiencies in your firm’s operations, sometimes called an Issue Log or Issue Tracker. More than just a tool, an Issue Tracker is a critical cultural shift that
empowers your teams
leverages the experiences at every layer of your organization
de-stigmatizes mistakes, transforming them into opportunities for understanding, learning, and improvement.
The idea of using an internal reporting system within a firm to spot inefficiencies was perhaps made most famous by Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio. In his book, Principles: Life and Work, he discusses the idea behind the issue log:
“The Issue Log is our primary tool for recording our mistakes and learning from them. We use it to bring all problems to the surface, so we can put them in the hands of problem solvers to make systematic improvements. It acts like a water filter that catches garbage. Anything that goes wrong must be “issue logged” with the severity of the issue and who is responsible for it specified, so that it’s easy to sort through most problems. Issue logs also provide paths for diagnosing problems and the information pertaining to them.” - Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio (P. 474)
The main idea is to catch issues, big and small, that impact a system before they cause harm or add more strain to a process.
Take our sandwich shop example. Had there been an issue tracking system in place, the individual in charge of packaging might have been able to report that the tearing strip on the tape dispenser had grown dull, slowing down the sandwich packing. The blade could have been replaced long before the bad outcome of displeased customers had occurred, while also avoiding the potential greater harm of reputation damage and lost sales.
ISSUE TRACKER BENEFITS BEYOND EFFICIENCY
Implementing an issue tracking system at your firm or on your team has additional benefits beyond solving inefficiencies and avoiding bad outcomes.
Accountability:
An issue tracker is a great way to hold others as well as yourself accountable. If you’re a founder or manager, reporting yourself can be a great way to highlight desired behaviors and flag bad habits before they escalate to firm-wide problems. Maybe you tend to be late to meetings. Tracking yourself can allow you to start setting goals to overcome your own inefficiencies and demonstrate the importance of punctuality to your team and firm.
Collaboration and communication:
Reporting problems that result from others in the organization encourages a dialogue to form around the habits of others in the workplace and promote collaboration between multiple parties. For example, a More Canvas client has started to review issues from their newly built issue tracker during bi-weekly team meetings. Employees are encouraged to discuss unresolved issues, diagnose what may have caused them, and develop a resolution together. The culture has become more open and honest, and productivity has increased due to process improvements.
Because of the issue tracker, all employees are accountable to the goal of being more efficient and “process-conscious.” Criticism and identifying mistakes is no longer the sole responsibility of management, and the negative feelings from being “called out” are starting to be replaced by a shared sense of ownership and potential for improvement. Previously unknown problems are being escalated to the decision makers, and processes are being refined to decrease delays and mistakes.
Recognizing Problem Patterns:
An issue log can help surface recurring problems within a firm. As everyone starts reporting issues, you may review the data through different lenses: e.g. by client, by area of the company, by employee, or by step in the workflow. Noticing repeated reports of the same issue, especially over time, can signal a major inefficiency or deeper process problem. Alternatively, if different issues are being reported in the same area, team, or process, that may indicate that significant review is required. Keeping a close eye on where and how the issues occur can be crucial to spotting the areas in which a firm can most improve while bad outcomes are still minor, or even before they manifest.
Develop Reusable Solutions
Why reinvent the wheel? A good issue tracker should also be designed to record all solutions, not just issues and the bad outcomes they cause. This firm-wide resolution archive helps eliminate additional waste in the form of re-work that would have been used to solve the same problem in different silos of your firm. Take a call center for example. If a phone operator encounters a customer who is confused about a specific product, they can report the incident in the issue tracker and record the solution. Then, other employees within the center can refer to the resolution archive when dealing with similarly confused customers and answer their questions more quickly, resulting in higher quality customer experience and a more productive call center.
ISSUE TRACKER BUILD-OUT
Although the concept may sound simple enough, not every issue tracker will be the same for each company. There are many factors to consider when designing an issue tracker that works for your organization’s habits, software, and culture.
Format:
Multiple services exist to host easy-to-use, customizable and even free issue trackers. Google and Microsoft forms are great for creating structure and guiding individuals through recording issues. They can also collect the data in spreadsheets for easy viewing and analysis. Additionally, project management services like Asana, have several ways to build-out a log whether through a project, board, or custom template. They also allow exporting to spreadsheets. Ultimately, the format chosen should be seamlessly integrated into existing company platforms to facilitate quick adoption and easy utilization by employees.
Questions:
The benefits to an issue log are only as good as the questions asked. Most logs should all have similar questions regarding the parties involved, individuals accountable, magnitude of the bad outcome, when or where the issue occurred, and if a solution was reached. However, each company must ask what outcomes they hope to achieve by implementing an issue tracker, and what data is necessary to collect from the issue log. These will help ensure the issue tracker is aligned to the company goals and able to surface mistakes or problems that may be unique to the firm.
Transparency or Privacy:
Can every employee see every issue reported? Or are only select issues viewable by everyone? The answer to this question depends on the core values of the company. If a firm values transparency above all else, ensuring that all employees can view all issues might be important to company culture. Likewise, a firm that prioritizes privacy, perhaps one with clients who require confidentiality or that handles sensitive information, may only allow full visibility of low-level issues, or may allow employees to see only those issues that impact their own teams and projects, rather than issues from the entire company.
Customizing and implementing an issue tracking system for your team or firm can encourage accountability, collaboration, communication, and a “process-conscious” culture in which mistakes are viewed as opportunities and all have a sense of ownership over increased productivity.
MORE CANVAS & THE ISSUE LOG
Here at More Canvas we specialize in understanding, streamlining, and simplifying work processes through customized solutions. We utilize methods such time-tracking, cost-benefit analysis, workflow assessments, culture audits, and issue trackers to guide firms toward a more aligned and efficient way of operating. By working directly with c-suite executives and their teams, we tailor our approach to fit each client’s needs.
Our mission is to get you more canvas to realize the vision for your business, whether that be through strategic advisement, operations improvement, or marketing and communications management.