We Need More People!

We've all run into situations where an organization decides on a solution before fully diagnosing the problem. Not surprisingly, it doesn't work.

One of the biggest conclusions I see organizations jump to is staffing. It's a natural progression: something fails, everyone is overwhelmed, so the answer must be more people.

But that's rarely my first conclusion.

Before hiring, restructuring, retraining, or, above all, buying new software, it's essential to understand how the work actually happens today before adding more variables.

I'd start with questions like:

• Who owns the process?

• Where is the work tracked?

• Where are the handoffs?

• How do people know when something is waiting on them?

• What happens when someone is out?

• Where does work tend to stall? For how long? Why?

• What information is missing when problems occur?

  
  

The answers to those questions don't usually point to staffing, at least not exclusively.

And y'all already know what I'm going to say: these aren't people problems; they're systems problems.

I keep coming back to that distinction because it's at the heart of almost every organizational challenge I've encountered. When we diagnose the wrong problem, we implement the wrong solution.

Hiring more people into a broken process doesn't fix the process. Neither does buying new software. Those decisions can absolutely be the right ones, but only after you've understood what the system is actually telling you.