Run a Visible Process Well & Get Noticed
Somewhere in my 10th year at a large company, I realized the inner workings of a large company are very odd. I’d come from a consulting background where you had little time to get things moving, you learned quickly what worked. Only the best ways made it through the grind. Large companies were different — each group did things how they wanted to, used whatever process they felt best, and you had to live with it. They had refined their ways over time, polished their stone to perfection so to speak, and even if other groups weren’t happy, there was ‘lack of resources’ and ‘too much to do’ to point back to.
And then there were the climbers, people who got promoted quickly. They always seemed to be where the action was, always had words to say. If you dig deeper, they are easy to work with, they listened and you felt while you may not get what you wanted, they had tried to make the best of your input.
The Hope
Which brings me to the topic of the story — each person in a company has responsibility for some aspect of it. You could run vendor relations, or do competitor analysis, or manage the cloud. Something others rely on you to do. And you end up communicating about what you do and the details of what’s up in your area. People want to know what’s going on, while being busy with everything else. You have the opportunity to wow people from your place. And get noticed. ‘That guy is really on top of things’. ‘She’s really shaking up things’.
One aspect of being on top of things is tracking what’s going on, and even better creating a system where everyone can see for themselves what’s going on. And letting everyone contribute to it. An example would be budgeting — how often is the budget for the department locked up in some system and only a few people can access, and you really don’t know when it was last updated and whether your updates for some pricing increase made it into the ‘current’ budget. Another example could be the invoice approvals — tracking which invoices have been received, reviewed, which are pending approvals, which are pending payment, etc.. These are simple processes that in today’s time still run on antiquated systems and don’t allow for transparency to all the people that need it. These are both examples of opportunities for someone to clean up things and show how they are a thinker and will have impact wherever they go.
The Ask
QvikList (https://qviklist.com) is a tool for managing business information that can support you in this. You can use it for tracking all sorts of things you might put in a spreadsheet but either don’t because it doesn’t scale to many people working or don’t because you don’t want people making all those changes. Giving people read-only access or access to only certain rows and columns is very easy and feels safe. Tracking who made what change when, going back to an older version, and even require change review and approvals is possible. You can store documents with the information (ex. invoices with the record of the invoice or a candidate’s resume along w/ information about that individual) and you can capture approvals so you have audits and people know that you’re running a tight ship.
Be a change maker, look to make a difference, and remember no area is too small or without opportunity to shine.
