Many businesses — including some I’ve been involved with — suffer from endless firefighting. What gets worked on (i.e. fixed) is what is the most urgent at the time, usually associated with some serious customer complaining, or financial or legal risk. Ultimately, the business becomes a team of heroes, burning everyone out and not really making serious headway in what is really important: growing the business and its revenue base. The “hero model” is very dangerous for a business, because there is so much reliance on individuals. If a key individual gets sick or leaves, it creates serious disruption to the business.
I’ve found, whether we’re talking about the business priorities as a whole, or managing a software development team or project, it helps to identify priorities and focus on the highest priority issues first. By focusing on what’s important, you move the business forward and you will naturally move away from the hero model. By staying focused on the key drivers of your business (assuming you know what they truly are), your processes and systems should become more robust, fault tolerant and less reliant on key individuals.
There are many ways to devise a priority schedule, but here’s one I’ve found that is simple, easy to use and quite effective. It’s a simple “sev system” or severity scale.
| Tag |
Meaning |
Definition |
| SEV1 |
Critical |
A revenue-generating opportunity, or representing a definite and substantial financial, legal or HR risk to the business. For software development, this represents functionality that is unavailable, severely corrupted, or severely degraded for a significant number of customers and/or employees. |
| SEV2 |
Serious |
A cost-containment opportunity, or representing a moderate financial, legal or HR risk to the business. In software development, this represents functionality that is unavailable, severely corrupted, or severely degraded for a limited number of customers and/or employees. |
| SEV3 |
Medium |
A potential legal, HR or financial risk to the business. In software development, this represents an issue where a bypass or manual fix is available. |
| SEV4 |
Minor |
No potential cost savings or revenue generating capability, and no risks to the business. In software development, this represents functionality that is degraded, but this degradation is relatively insignificant (i.e. cosmetic or negative goodwill). |
How many people or businesses do you know, that have a tendency to focus on SEV3’s or SEV4’s? We get caught up on how things look, versus how they perform or what they mean to our business, our customers or our employees.
My advice is to create, revise and maintain a list of your business tasks and priorities. Everything on the list has an assigned SEV code, and you devise a corporate policy such as “No SEV1’s will be on the list for more than a week” and “We won’t work on lower SEV issues, when higher SEV issues exist.” Devise a system of accountability, and assign your heroes to the important SEV tasks.
One other suggestion is to keep a corporate journal, wiki or help system that serves to document all your processes, functionality and systems. Make updating this system one of the components of every task. Make sure a different employee or department “tests” the functionality or issue, before its removed from the task list.
By objectively tracking the severity of the issues in your business, you will add accountability and ensure the most important and strategic issues are confronted and resolved in your business, thereby helping to maximize revenues and contain costs within your business.