I have a small lawn that I could mow in minutes. But I have a landscaper. Why? Because I believe wholeheartedly that just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. It’s often referred to as opportunity cost: what you miss out on while doing something less valuable. – Chuck Smith
Often, what we most appreciate during a time of crisis are the things that have NOT changed. Renewed appreciation for those things, renewed focus on those things. And a desire to invest in and nurture those things to grow has now taken priority over investments in the latest shiny thing. Not to say that innovation isn’t important. Just the opposite. Getting back to basics – your core business – can give you a grounded sense of confidence in your business. And confidence spurs innovation like nothing else.
For example, if you are a cloud storage provider, the most efficient use of your staff’s time is spent maintaining the cloud environment, making that real estate easy to purchase and innovating to meet future cloud demand. However, many of your customers don’t have the skill set to move themselves into the cloud space they’ve just purchased from you. So, there is a good chance that plenty of your staff can’t simply move from one closed deal to the next without handling a migration in-between. Perhaps they’ve taken on the role of cloud migrators simply out of necessity. Maybe they see it as part of their job because they can do it, so why not do it?
Perhaps you can migrate your own customers. But is that the best use of your time?
Allocate human resources in a way that ensures your people are always doing what they do best. Emphasizing their strengths and side-lining everything else is staff optimization at its absolute best.
Retracting to your core business can be a great time to re-calibrate and consider the trajectory of your business. Ask yourself what percentage of everything that is happening in your business supports your core business. Has your staff gotten involved in ancillary projects that increase their workloads, but don’t return value? Explore those areas to see if you can reclaim that investment.
Learn more about how your organization can start winning this war and benefit from a digital workload assessment with the experts at DAG.