You Had One Job...

Image Source: www.meonuk.com

I’m not sure if you are into memes, but there is one that pops up occasionally on my Facebook page that more often than not brings a chuckle.  It’s called “You had one job!” and is usually accompanied by a picture that shows something completely screwed up.  You can get a glimpse of this meme at www.hadonejob.com

If you clicked on the link, welcome back.  I’m sure you’ve enjoyed the site.  Now let’s get serious.

If you sat down and created a list of all the things your IT team delivers, I’m sure it would be quite long. It would cover infrastructure, development, services, procurement, security, analytics, reporting, and a whole litany of other things. It can be overwhelming thinking about everything you need to do.

It’s no wonder you are so tired at the end of the day after doing so many challenging, important things.

To the people in your organization, most of them would likely view IT much differently.

Their list might only have one item.

It’s not about you, and how busy you are. It’s all about them, and what they need from you.

They don’t care about all the other things your team does.

They really just need their problem solved.

Simple.

While I’m not telepathic, I can sense a number of you disagreeing with me at the moment.

That’s ok. I used to think just like you.

I also used to think that IT was about delivering technology.

I was so wrong.

I certainly talked about customer service, and was sure I got into IT because I liked ‘helping people’, but in reality it really was about really, really, cool stuff.

So what changed?  A book I read more than 10 years ago. In his book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins talked about Land’s End clothing and their attitude about technology.  They had sophisticated systems in place to help them run their business, but to them technology was like oxygen… absolutely necessary for life, but not something you think about unless it’s not there.

Land’s End was not about technology. They were about a great customer experience. Technology provided a platform to accomplish this.

The people that interacted with Land’s End from the customers, to the employees to the suppliers were more concerned with the experience and the transaction, not the technology that delivered it.  It didn’t matter to them that the platform was extremely sophisticated and required a thousand different tasks and several people to deliver it.

They just wanted IT to solve their problem quickly if things went wrong.

It doesn’t matter how well you deliver on everything else (which is important).

In their eyes, you had one job… and you either passed, or failed.

With all the KPIs and metrics in place, do you have this one?

You can call it the “You had one job” KPI.

Now that I’ve sufficiently drained the joy out of your day, let me remind you of that link again… www.hadonejob.com