Succeed With Moraware: Four Questions To Ask

Here at Moraware, we like to use four simple questions to understand what problems you are experiencing and how to use our software to solve those problems.

These four questions all start with "What...". If you ask these four questions, and sometimes ask them more than once, you can uncover what needs to change and what doesn't. We hope that you find it useful as a simple way of thinking about improving your business.

What are you doing now?

You can't make a change if you don't understand where you're coming from. How are you scheduling now? On a whiteboard? In Outlook or Google? In your head? A combination of these things? Something else? Even if it's ad hoc or always changing, you've got to be doing something.

What works about it?

Whatever you're doing now, you must be doing for a reason. Something inherently works about it. Maybe it's simply, "I know how to do it." Maybe it's, "Everyone in the shop can see the schedule when it's on the whiteboard." When something is broken, it's harder to identify what works about it, letting you know a change is urgent.

What doesn't work?

There also has to be a reason you want to make a change. If you can't identify what's wrong with one of your processes, then maybe you shouldn't change it. For our customers, growth is often what causes something that used to work to stop working.

Identifying the pain of your situation is key to determining the solution. If a proposed solution doesn't eliminate the pain or at least make it better, then you might as well keep the old solution until you find a better alternative. For example, if you're the only one who can change the schedule, then you may be not doing other things that also need your attention. Or perhaps it's great that everyone can see the schedule on the whiteboard, but it's really a hassle for you to get up from your desk to change it 20 times a day. Our software can help solve those problems.

What are the consequences of not changing?

There has to be a clear benefit to changing to get people on board to do things differently. That's often best expressed by understanding the consequences of not changing.

As your business grows, sticking with your old processes will slow you down. For example, a whiteboard and file folders might have worked just fine when you were doing 10 counter tops per week, but now that you're doing 20, you start finding that activities are falling through the cracks. If you don't change your scheduling process in that situation, you may lose customers, damage your business reputation, and ultimately lose money.

Depending on the problem you're trying to solve the consequences of not changing might not be enormous. That's a sign that you might have higher priorities to address elsewhere, or simply that your business is running smoothly.