How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 5. Looking at the Right It

How could a problem like Nancy’s have persisted for everyone in a whole department, for however long they’d been suffering with it? Was it just the distance between buildings? Being physically separated didn’t help, but that’s not really the biggest contributor to the problem. I’ve been too many places where the same kinds of problems were happening just down the hall. Technical people just tend not to visit their users. In Nancy’s specific case, you could say that if she and I hadn’t both been a little stubborn, then there wouldn’t have been a fun story called “Nancy” in this book.

I understand, I really do. It takes guts to walk down the hall and ask whether everything’s OK, when you know that, one, you might get an earful, and two, you might not be able to do anything about it. Because, after all, what do you know about accounting—or manufacturing, or retail, or aircraft landing gear maintenance, or garbage truck scheduling? But with practice, talking to users becomes a habit, and it doesn’t bother you anymore. And you become a more valuable player to the business.

Remember: there’s always, “I don’t know, but I can help you find out.” It’s the leadership thing to do.

So on the very first morning of my engagement in Denver, Nancy was right there on the speakerphone, explaining her problem to us. But I just didn’t get it. Her explanation didn’t fit into any of the predefined slots in my brain about Oracle Financials performance. But I knew that ...