In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:
those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)
our bosses (corporate hierarchy)
colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)
regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)
family (family)
friends and neighbors (society)
ourselves (ourselves)
And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:
What does our customer want?
What is the highest value they can get from my work?
Do I have time to give them that value?
How much value can I get done in the time I have?
Will that level of value be sufficient?
We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:
Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?
Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.
Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.
Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.
Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.
It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?