The biggest failure in business
often happens right when a company goes through a growth spurt. While
many business owners celebrate their new prosperity, they next face
product or service delivery challenges. For small business, the "growth"
moment can make or break their future. Failure to deliver means all
that new business will go away as fast as it came. As business leaders
and managers, the first thought might be panic. Managers who look at the
list of new business might go into overwhelm and not even know where to
begin, and this is where failure happens.
To
manage BIG growth, you must first scale it down and then prioritize.
The first small step toward BIG delivery is to take the new projects,
make a list, and put a deadline next to each one. Then you're going to
want to bring out a calendar either electronic or paper (writing
information down is still a great brain exercise). First use a calendar
where you can plan ahead and write down all of the deadlines (this is
project management made simple). Now backtrack and create smaller
deadlines to meet that lead up to the final deadline. See what we're
doing: we're breaking it into smaller parts. The smaller deadlines will
be the deadlines required that lead to creation of the whole. Each
project on the list should have a deadline and smaller deadlines. How do
you create the smaller deadlines? How long does it take to finish each
task on a daily basis? Give each smaller deadline enough time for
completion.
If
you've got multiple projects with multiple deadlines, you should be
able to break it down into daily tasks to make each smaller deadline.
Now how do you know when your human capital (staff) are overloaded and
cannot manage all of this work on their own? That is another blog, but
in the meantime your small deadline require small tasks. List daily
tasks as daily goals. As the tasks are completed (thus daily goals
achieved), move to the next. This should happen each day. So when you
think about it, one big deadline amounts to daily small deadlines. Stay
on task and stay on deadline and you'll deliver your BIG project.
