Blog · Programme management
When firefighting becomes the norm, you stop recognising smooth operations.
If you spend all day putting out fires, you get used to it. And once you're used to it, you no longer see how things could be different. Why many SME owners find it hard to judge their own digital operations, and what the Quickscan does about it.
As the owner of an SME, you are often down in the engine room yourself. There's a supplier who hasn't delivered what was promised, a system that happens to be playing up today, an employee standing at your desk with a question. You sort it out, because that's what you do. And tomorrow it starts all over again.
After a while, that becomes your normal. You assume that a bit of chaos simply comes with the territory, and that chasing after everything is part of running a business. What you're missing is a point of comparison. You have rarely seen up close what an organisation looks like when things do run smoothly, so it's hard to judge whether things are right in your own business or not.
You can't recognise smooth operations if you've never experienced them
That isn't a lack of insight. It's simply how it works. You judge your own situation against what you know, and what you know is your own day-to-day practice. If that practice has been running on improvising and adjusting for years, then improvising and adjusting feel like the only way it can be done.
We see this regularly in conversations. Someone talks at length about the fires they've put out that week, almost with a certain pride, without realising that each of those fires is a symptom of something that could be structurally better. Not because they're doing a bad job, but because nobody has ever shown them how it could be different.
Why we built the Quickscan
We wanted to do something about that without you having to ask for a meeting or a quote straight away. That's why we built the Quickscan: a short, honest assessment that takes a few minutes to complete and holds up a mirror to your business.
The scan doesn't ask about technology you know nothing about. It asks about things you do feel as an owner: does the collaboration with your suppliers work as it should, do you know where your projects stand, can you see the return on your investments, and does the knowledge depend on one person or is it embedded in your organisation. Those are exactly the places where an SME quietly gets stuck without anyone putting a name to it.
What you get out of it
At the end you don't get a sales pitch, but a picture of where your digitalisationHelping your organisation work smarter with technology, not as an IT project but as a way of working. stands. What is working well, you can happily leave as it is. Where things could be better, you now at least know that they could, and where you would start. For some people that is reassuring, for others it is the first realisation that things could run more smoothly. Either way, you have something you didn't have before: a point of comparison.
You don't have to work with us to get something out of it. Just take the Quickscan over a coffee and see what it tells you.
