I recall arriving on a wet and windy winter's day at Swindon railway station in the west of England for a pre meet in the station buffet. This station has a long history on Great Western Railway but on such a day it was depressing.
We also had a seemingly intractable problem to resolve with a customer contract that had endless moving parts and different bits of the organisation involved and pulling in alternative directions.
The regular salesman who knew the account was also on holiday which didn't help. However for some reason he was replaced by his boss's boss. He was a larger than life character in every sense of the word and had seen it all before.
He listened to our woes for five minutes as the trains pulled in and out of the station platforms. Then he made a simple and elegant suggestion. Let's he said create a timeline so we can understand where we have come from and where we might be going. This we did literally on the back of an envelope. Once we had identified the key events such as contract signature, planned delivery date, expected delivery date and so on we could understand the problem holistically and attach consequences and actions to each relevant event.
I was reminded of this story and the usefulness of timelines for resolving problems or for developing projects and businesses earlier this week. I commend their use especially when all else seems to be failing. It's also easy to do and if you want to be a bit more professional when you create a timeline than writing on an envelope you can do this in Word or there are various on line tools available. I have just tried out the free Office Timeline that adds the function into PowerPoint and can recommend this as a good starting point.
We also had a seemingly intractable problem to resolve with a customer contract that had endless moving parts and different bits of the organisation involved and pulling in alternative directions.
The regular salesman who knew the account was also on holiday which didn't help. However for some reason he was replaced by his boss's boss. He was a larger than life character in every sense of the word and had seen it all before.
He listened to our woes for five minutes as the trains pulled in and out of the station platforms. Then he made a simple and elegant suggestion. Let's he said create a timeline so we can understand where we have come from and where we might be going. This we did literally on the back of an envelope. Once we had identified the key events such as contract signature, planned delivery date, expected delivery date and so on we could understand the problem holistically and attach consequences and actions to each relevant event.
I was reminded of this story and the usefulness of timelines for resolving problems or for developing projects and businesses earlier this week. I commend their use especially when all else seems to be failing. It's also easy to do and if you want to be a bit more professional when you create a timeline than writing on an envelope you can do this in Word or there are various on line tools available. I have just tried out the free Office Timeline that adds the function into PowerPoint and can recommend this as a good starting point.
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