Still on the planning theme, I spent some time discussing the need to ensure that all activities that a team undertakes are congruent with the strategy. I believe that it’s important that time and effort is not wasted doing things that either don’t make a difference or which don’t follow a logical and thought through sequence. As an example, let’s take a mystery shopper program. Introducing a program without having put in place robust customer service training and without ensuring that the appropriate incentives are in place means that you just end up measuring service standards as opposed to helping improve them. I had the pleasure of working with a COO at SSP who always spoke about “sustainable fixes”. He impressed upon me the need to ensure that whatever activity you do in order for it to really drive the business you had to ensure that is was self sustaining for example, at the moment we could focus on payroll and trawl the country fixing everyone’s schedule, however given that currently many managers have no sight of their weekly/monthly payroll number and little idea about how to structure the ideal schedule and how to recruit to that schedule the chances are that our payroll problems would surface again pretty quickly!
It’s the weekend (obviously!) and our plan is to take a trip out with Alex today and then complete our Xmas shopping. I’m not keen on doing anything last minute…..
random outpourings 