As a small business, we pay very close attention to the costs of insurance and healthcare costs that we provide for our employees. In the past few days I've heard the President mention that his government sponsored programs will keep private insurance companies honest. I ask who will keep the government honest? At least on an open market I am free to fire my insurance company and select another-I dont suppose I get thqt option with the government.
The other thing I heard him say was that a government program will not effect private programs, that they would not have an unfair advantage in the marketplace. And I think this is truly an intellectually dishonest statement. How can the rule maker not have an unfair advantage? Legislators place so many rules on the private companies that clearly will not apply to them-these legislators certainly have no idea the financial impact in the marketplace of the foolish requirements they create.
Based on recent legislation here in Colorado, our company is facing what we understand to be the highest rate increase our agent has ever seen in a year-almost a 70% increase in cost that will be shared by the company and employees. Unbelievable!
Mark
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Workflow Benefits
I've recently witnessed numerous cases of businesses that are lacking processes for their core business deliverables. We've been told that processes run the business and people run the processes, but I personally believe that people play a larger role in the business than just running processes.
Nevertheless it is difficult to provide consistent quality and scale the business if good processes are not in place. The companion to a good porcess is a process tool. I was asked yesterday "how do you keep people from backsliding on new processes that you set up?", and the answer is simply to institute tools to track progress and make the new porcess a part of the job. Once a tool is in place and funtioning porperly it is awfully ahrd to move back to the old way of doing things. Sometimes we refer about this as adoption, and work very hard to get buy-in from the various users of the process to ensure that the tool is adopted fully. I argue that once this has happened it is much harder to backslide to an old way of doing things, and if the tool is configured well, it can identify a lack of adoption, or exceptions to the process-which in turn become management tasks.
Mark
Nevertheless it is difficult to provide consistent quality and scale the business if good processes are not in place. The companion to a good porcess is a process tool. I was asked yesterday "how do you keep people from backsliding on new processes that you set up?", and the answer is simply to institute tools to track progress and make the new porcess a part of the job. Once a tool is in place and funtioning porperly it is awfully ahrd to move back to the old way of doing things. Sometimes we refer about this as adoption, and work very hard to get buy-in from the various users of the process to ensure that the tool is adopted fully. I argue that once this has happened it is much harder to backslide to an old way of doing things, and if the tool is configured well, it can identify a lack of adoption, or exceptions to the process-which in turn become management tasks.
Mark
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