Help with process development

[mikew08]

Hi all,

I work for a small e-commerce company consulting and designing shopping carts solutions for SME companies as well as supplying the support post implementation. Although we are very good at dealing with new business / projects coming into the business which are generally delivered on time and within budget we seem to struggle with scheduling the support work that comes in (those jobs that take a day or so to complete) and invariably end up shoe horning them around our current workload thus working longer hours.

As much as we are coping with this at the minute it is obviously not a sustainable process and needs changing. Has anyone any hints or tips on where to begin to fix this or been in a similar situation and can provide any advice??

Thanks in advance!!
Mike

[who_me]

This will be about as much help as a poke in the eye, but when we get stretched we employ, we employ a small number of dual rolled employees that are able to cover the areas of demand with no down time making growth easier to manage and identification of demand much more transparent.

We also look to impliment standardisation in EVERYTHING so that similar processes can be automated making technical roles manageable by customer services it also allows us to employ good coders and not worry about using tekkies for mundane or repetitive rolls that are semi technical.

[Peter Bowen]

Hi Mike,

I've found that it's really helpful to draw up a flow chart of how the work comes into, gets done and moves out of the business. The act of mapping it out (large piece of paper, some colored pens) often shows things that you wouldn't see otherwise.

It also makes it easier to see where the bottlenecks are, where you should be applying triage and where you might be missing opportunities to add extra value.

Here is a link to a video I made of how to do this:

http://www.nomore247.com/support/Mapping/index.html

Cheers

Pete

[webworxindia]

Usually the support work is not very big and takes couple of hours. You can have some freshers or trainees who can do this for you. Or you can also thinking of outsourcing it to some local freelancers or also to an offshore company.

[movietub]

Hi,

I used to be hopelessly confused when I got very busy. Now I use MS project religiously. Its actually very effective, it allows be to tell people at a glance when I can do what they are asking. Just makes life easier and makes my work order as efficient as possible.

So I guess its true to say work smart, not hard. Then again if you lucky enough to be really really busy either raise prices for support or employ some help. Either way there is potential for you to earn more money in the long run.

Nightmare trying to find the right staff for a small business of course - I know.

[edmondscommerce]

I suppose if you can justify an extra member of staff then thats got to be the best option.. any free time could be spent doing extra promotional work for yourselves