Eliminate Scheduling Woes and Run Your Business Without a Calendar
When you define the known, define the unknown, and use standard time elements, you really can schedule your business without a calendar.
If you have to schedule your work, you don’t know your business.
I say it again:
If you claim to know how long something will take but you have to look at your calendar to schedule it, you don’t know how long it will take.
“Bruce, where do you get off making such a claim?!”
Hear me out.
If I ask you,
“How long will it take you get this done?”
What am I really asking? I’m asking,
“When can I have the finished result from you?”
These are two very different questions.
One asks, “What amount of time will you spend doing the task I’ve asked for?” The other asks, “When will I get to enjoy the fruit of your labor?”
A lot of us are trained to respond to the first question with how long the task will take us. When we do this, we play right into the asker’s hand. When we say, “2 hours,” they think, “Great, so I can have this in 2 hours!” But, if you can’t start on it for another 3 weeks, it doesn’t feel like it will take you 2 hours. From the asker’s perspective, it will take you 3 weeks.
Let’s simplify this to an easy binary:
capacity versus scheduling.
I think of capacity in terms of space. “How much space do I have? Does it feel tight, or free?” Scheduling, on the other hand, has very little to do with space and everything to do with deadlines. “When does the recipient need this work from me?” Sometimes there’s overlap, but these are two very different things.
The procrastinator in all of us inherently understands this. “This essay due in 2 weeks will only take me a few hours to do, so I’ll wait until a few hours before the deadline to start it.”
But when you run your business this way, you end up playing a game of both Jenga and Tetris, fighting for calendar space in a world that doesn’t care that it’s already full.
So how can I make the claim that if you need to look at your calendar you don’t know how long something will take? I can make this claim because I’m including capacity in my definition.
This is how you can wind up with a better way to schedule.
Define the Known
To define the know, you must know:
The Known: What exists
The Known Unknown: What you expect to exist
The Known includes the things an expert can anticipate. If you’re taking a customer live on a new version of software, you know all the checklist steps necessary to make it happen. Installing new versions, migrating data, testing in various environments, etc.
Real experts also know The Known Unknown. These experts know there are troubles coming from a certain version, that the checklist is incomplete in a few key areas, and that the latest version of a certain server causes issues.
This also includes things like emergencies. Yes, you can plan for emergencies. Following this example, suppose it’s known that, on average, a typical go live incurs 20 hours of emergency support. It could be a new version flaw or a known interface issue. These “known unknown” variables need to be part of your known definition.
If you’ve ever done a home improvement project, you know it takes 3 trips to the department store: one for what you thought you need, a second to exchange it for what you meant to buy the first time, and a final trip for what it takes to actually complete the job!
So, defining The Known includes both the known and the anticipated unknown.
Define the Unknown
The Unknown (or The Unknown Unknown, the differentiate from The Known Unknown). If it’s unknown, how can you plan for it? In a word: history. We live in a world where there is no shortage of data. Doing nothing with it and ignoring its patterns is what kills most companies when it comes to their concept of scheduling.
If your company or department has been around for more than 6 months, you have data you can use to evaluate what emergencies came up. The longer, the better. You can use your definition of The Known to infer or create the amount of time used up by The Unknown.
For example, if your definition of The Known (including the Known Unknown) comes to 40 hours in a week for a certain job, and your history also tells you there are emergencies that come up each week, but you’re expecting someone to only work 40 hours—you’ve missed something, somewhere! (Or, you didn’t, and that’s also a problem!)
It’s here we must turn to the critical element of time.
Standard Time Elements
Do this by updating your time definitions. Many organizations are familiar with the terms, “Planned Start Date” and “Planned Finish Date,” whether by these names, the acronyms of PSD and PFD, or some other unique term.
At this point, we are still not talking about Actual Start and Finish Dates, another key measurement!
But what are these? A PSD is something you come up with after you look at a calendar. A PFD is likewise determined after you look at a calendar.
It’s here where I get back to my original claim: if you have to look at a calendar, you don’t know your business. Scheduling should be nothing more than a cursory formality if you understand your business’s capacity.
Instead of thinking in terms of PSD and PFD, start using the three following standard time elements:
Maximum duration
Speed to start
Time spent
Maximum duration may seem synonymous with a PFD, but the key difference is that the Max duration is something a professional business should know beforehand. They should know that a code update takes no longer than 2 business weeks. You can know that a contract will take no more than 1 business day to process.
In order to achieve these pre-determined deadlines, you must also know how quickly you will start on the work task, or your speed to start. This seems synonymous with the PSD, but again—it’s predetermined.
The time spent is nothing more than the time you log to complete the work. This matches the number of minutes or hours you put on your timecard.
Even if these standards feel the same as what you do today, I can assure you they are not.
These standards must be known and predetermined if you are ever to hope to manage your capacity.
If you leave everything to chance and only schedule work based on the calendar and live by PSD and PFD, you are asking everyone to be slave to the calendar. I, for one, do not like having anyone tell me what do, let alone an inanimate object I don’t consent to!
When you set up your work units with max duration, speed to start, and time spent, you inherently get a built-in measurement of your capacity.
This built-in measurement of capacity then allows you to know your routine work—including the emergency situations that will invariably pop up—can be done in what amount of time based on the number of people you have. This proactive way of measuring your business allows you do schedule work without looking at a calendar and helps you know when to grow your staff or change your processes.
Imagine a world where you have an urgent household repair. You call two businesses to try and get it resolved.
Business one fields your call and answers, “We’ll have someone call you to learn more about your problem when we can.” Do you even leave them your number? Probably not.
The second business answers. That person asks probing questions about your situation, gives you an accurate summary of your situation, and tells you the name of who will be out there, how long it will take for them to get there, how long the repair will take, and what the expected cost will be. It should be an easy “Yes!” to this company.
Here’s the thing: do you really care how much the repair will cost when it’s an emergency? When they offer top-notch service?
Usually not.
When your business adopts The Healthy Company Framework, you gain inherent capacity and the ability to outperform—and out-charge—the competition.
What would it mean if your frontline support or sales team could guarantee timelines? What would that do to ease anger from the irate customer or shorten the sales cycle? It would alleviate your customers concerns and get more money in your bank account faster.
So, can you really run your business without a calendar? Of course not. But you don’t have to let it be your task master, either.
If you’d like to learn more, let us know. We’d love to help you make this your reality.
Great businesses know their business, even without a calendar.