100% or 0%? Breaking remote tasks assignments into boolean factors.

Since my last post was pretty remedial, I figure I will stick to that theme for while.

In this post, I talk about how to assign work remotely to employees. One of the biggest frustrations we at Orange Star have faced is having to go back two and three times on a task for an employee to get it right. Also, have been on the receiving end of this, I can honestly say it is a total drag for the employee. It not only frustrates them, but also hurts morale. Not good.

That being said, I have always assigned work tasks in groups of small related items that apply to one logical entity. For example, in my biz, that would be a series of small changes that all apply to a single web page. To me, that made sense, and it really does except for the manner in which the are assigned.

If you assign a group of tasks to an employee, you will get into a scenario where a single task could remain at 80% complete forever and you, as the employee/supervisor, will have to constantly re-evaluate that task to recall what parts are done and not done.

Although I am still occasionally guilty of this, I have gotten better. Now, I assign lots and lots of singular and very granular tasks to employees with the following rule: You must break the work down to the point that any one task can never be partially completed. It is either 100% or 0%.

I use Base Camp for this and wind up with a very long list of short to do item. I ask my employees to annotate these to do item and assign them back to me when they are done. (See my previous post on process). However, there are a number of ways to do this. I have used excel spreadsheets where they can color code a row when complete. I have used Outlook Task Assignment and a number of other means. Whatever the tool, the important thing to remember is to break down the tasks.

The next important rule here is to never mix tasks. If you create one task that, in it's completion creates more work, close the first and create second. Never leave a situation where you can say, "Well, this part is done, but the second part is not."

Everything is either 100% or 0%.

How important is process to a SOHO?

PROCESS IS EVERYTHING!! I will say it again....PROCESS IS EVERYTHING!!! (I added an extra ! for emphasis).

Basically, a consistent internal process or lack thereof, is the absolute most critical thing in your business. It is at the crux of everything: sales, cash-flow, production, communication, bookkeeping -- you name it.

I am not telling you this because I have a perfect process, but at Orange Star Design, we have a darn good one and it gets better all the time. Here is some background on how it has developed:

We used to operate as independent entities with mostly verbal status and instruction about projects between planning, design, production, etc. It was rough! We were always inconsistent and were spending a TON of time on the old "last 10% rule" with our projects. Nothing was getting completed and it was because the same tasks were being verbally assigned about 4 times per project and were then forgotten and assigned again.

We decided to find a way to track all this stuff. Most of the tools were bunk and poorly designed. Then we found Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com) and life seemed really good for a while.

However, we soon discovered that having a great tool did not make life complete. You had to learn to use the tool and basecamp is far from an out-of-the-box process enhancer. In fact, the creator, 37 Signals, make very clear in their book "Getting Real," that they purposely create a limited feature set in order to challenge the imaginations of the users to find ways to make the tool do what they need.

Basecamp's To-Do list function is pretty basic. It allows you to create a list, enter an item, assign the item to a user who is email, sort the items, and then close the item. However, it does not allow for the recording of dates, the association of files and the posting of threaded comments. So, we have learned a system where the to-do item is assigned with the date and the initial order and emailed to the person responsible. When the task is complete, the person put their initials and a note (ex. NV: Done) and assigns it back to the original person.

OK, so I know what you are thinking, this is some pretty basic stuff. Why are you telling me this? The reason I am telling you is that I want you to understand that the essence of a good process is simplicity. So many project managers create these amazingly complex spreadsheets, Work Break-down Structures and Gannt charts and, in the end, they have created a process so complex that they don't have the time -- or the brainpower -- to keep it going.

So, RULE #1: Keep your process simple.

Next, we used to attempt to segregate the phases of a project to the point that we would get all freaked-out when they overlapped. Which, by the way, they always do. Phased projects are great on paper and definitely help to sell some level of assurance to the client, but realistically, when the phases become badly overlapped or don't hit deadlines, you are generally worse off than without.

The reason this happened to us is because we really had no finite idea of what a completed phase looked like and when it was over and that is my point here. Spend some serious time thinking about how you develop your product or perform a service. Really think about what can be standardized and what cannot. Then, standardize everything you can and get good at it. Practice a lot so that it is fast and easy.

Try out standardization on yourself first until you have made it a habit and then teach it your team. As you do, it cut-out the overly complex parts and reduce the process to as few steps as possible.

However, don't try to standardize every last thing. Not everything can be standardized and there are many parts of a job that must be left to good old fashioned hand-crafting and talent.

Rule #2: Standardize everything that can be standardized, but don't get crazy!

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that you cannot ask anyone to do something you are not willing to do yourself. So, as I have said earlier, you need to develop your process and then use it yourself until it is automatic and then teach it to others.

Rule #3: Don't do unto others what you wouldn't do to yourself. (Or something like that.)

So, in summary, there are three things I have pointed out: develop a simple process; standardize every area of your business you can; and practice what you preach.

What is a decentralized business?

"Decentralized business" is a phrase that my partner, Jodi Hersh, and I cooked up when were trying to explain to our clients how our company operates. People kept asking where our offices were located and we were always finding ourselves stumbling around with the explanation of how we work from home and connect our office using technology and strategy.

While we have employees and, in fact, have become a serious contender in our local and national market, we do not have a physical office location outside of our homes and none of our employees actual come to work.

Our company, Orange Star Design, has been in business for 15 years and we have seen our business increase substantially each year over the past years. So, we are an established business and actually have a history that very well surpasses the majority of our brick-and-mortar competitors. However, we have not always been so willing to admit that:

Originally, we began using the term "decentralized" as a crutch to sell work to companies that are stuck in the mind-set that a brick-and-mortar establishment is the only way to operate a product and efficient business. In doing so, we always have had a bit of an inferiority complex. We knew that we were not charging nearly the rates that the large firms were charging and have been able to leverage that as a selling point, but as we learned more about our business and refined our internal processes to accommodate more growth, we came to realize that our prices were beginning to creep in that direction.

This was a problem because we also knew that much of our past success was based on our clients price-point and budget as opposed to their perception of the quality they would be getting. In other words, we were what they could afford and they came to view us more as outsourced labor than they did as consultants.

So, about 18 months ago, we made the choice to transform ourselves from people who translated a clients vision into a print, web or illustrative product, to expert consultants who not only created a product, but also defined what that product would be.

In doing so, we have been able to leverage our process and experience to increase our revenues and have been able to sell our product at a higher rate. It has worked well and we are now working on larger projects with less defined scope where our talents as both consultants and producers is put to work. However, we then began to fall back into the old quandary of feeling that, for the prices we now charge, we needed to justify it with a physical location.

We began looking in the spring of 2008 and would spend at least one afternoon per week for a few months driving around the city of Decatur discussing and looking. As time went by, we were able to narrow this down to a few types of offices and space we would need for now and later.

We then made appointments to look at offices and actually found one or two that were not only perfect for our business, but were really good deals. That left us very excited and we were just on the cusp of pulling the trigger and decided to have one last really honest "devils advocate" style conversation.

We decided to explore the question: "Why do we need the office?"

For client meetings. We figured out that we have about 5 meetings per year where our clients actually want to come to us. So, it was not for that. We knew that one of our arguments for getting an office was so that we could justify the size and scope of our clients and projects. But, when we really looked at it, we realized that we already HAD the clients, so we could not justify this as a means of selling larger work.

To have a place to put our employees. Well, my employees are oversees. I have a staff of programmers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia who are awesome, but they won't be coming into work any time soon. (That is another blog post all together, but I promise to tell more.) Jodi has local staff, but part of the allure of Orange Star for employees is that we like to develop our employee/employer relationships based on an "Associate Model" (again...another post). So, what that means is that our employees actually prefer to work from home, cost us less because they are willing to trade the luxury and savings of working from home for a lower salary.

Finally, we said it was to get out of our homes and have a place where we can focus on work. That idea very quickly crashed and burned because we both LOVE being at home. We both have offices that are separated from the main part of our homes and, after all these years, have gotten into a really good work groove. Realistically, during our talks, we had always alluded to us taking "shifts" at the office so that we would not have to be there every day anyway, so the gist is that our hearts weren't in it to begin with.

So, in the end, we came to the following conclusions:

1. We needed to abandon the office idea. We chose instead to invest some of the money we would save on beefing up our internal systems so that we could support a decentralized office.

2. We would focus greater attention to our internal processes and strategies to support the idea of remote employees.

3. We would embrace the concept of a decentralized office and, in these times of high gas prices and the decaying nuclear family, use our experience to help other businesses develop with us.

So, moving forward, this blog will be devoted to sharing resources and tips for running decentralized business.