It should not matter if your company has five people or fifty people, you should always be looking to train your successor.  With a limited number of people replacing baby boomers in the workforce over the next 10 years, it is critical to grow up your internal talent.  I would like to discuss a few key points:

• Keeping your best people challenged- There are many reasons to challenge your team, but not all of them are obvious.  I believe that in order to keep a person on their toes, they should always be training their replacement.  I believe this lines up with a philosophy of not focusing on the immediate needs, but on a long term goal for your company or division.  Michael Gerber focuses on this core philosophy in his E-Myth series.  “Work on your business, not in your business.”  Without taking this high level approach, there is no upward push from behind and there is no desire for a manager to push themselves past the status quo.
• The talent pool is thin- between the retirement of baby boomers and the recession forcing companies to keep their very best talent, there is a smaller pool of available and qualified talent.  It is critical that companies look into their own ranks for upward promotion.
• Create an actual program- It may be a very loose structure, but there needs to be a defined line of succession.  Some companies may simply call their replacement an assistant.  Assistant manager, vice president, etc…  If a company or division has the resources a group could be assembled for mentorship and acceleration of talent.

As long as a the company leadership is developing its internal talent, the firm will always be pushing the bounds of their peoples’ ability.  Both managers and mentors will feel a sense of possibility in training their replacement; key positions will be deeper and junior employees will find upward learning and opportunity without looking for outside positions.  Keep in mind replacement costs and training without any plan for those key positions.

Whenever our team has attended a Connectwise event, we are often looked at as if we are strange alien creatures because our firm actually uses the workflow rules.  The workflow rules within the application are a little clunky, but their power is the factor that will take your service team to the next level.  We have found that by automating certain processes, the return is not only found in saving time, but creating processes because we know what the expected outcome will be each time an event happens.  Let me walk you through an item I love and one that I find very limiting.

I will assume you all have figured out SLAs and Agreements and how all of those play into the execution of workflow rules.  If you have not and I get enough feedback- I will be happy to discuss this in another blog.

LOVE It:

• Change Board Action- Whenever a criteria is met, the action is set for the board to change.  We use this rule for a couple of very important reasons.  We have a Service board that is monitored for incoming issues.  If one of our support team members needs to escalate, we have them set the ticket to a certain status.  After the ticket is in that status for 5 minutes, the action is set in the rule for the ticket to move back to our incoming issues board.  With good notes in the ticket, our team can now assign an escalation person or assign the ticket to another resource.   This is one of the best action items Connectwise has built.  **Be careful- the ticket takes the default status of the board it hops to.

NEED It:

• There is no Negative value in rule creation-  This drives our team crazy.  If Connectwise could put in a value that was “NOT =” or “NOT” we could RIP UP the workflows into something even more amazing.  WE have learned to work around the formula creation without this basic programming command.  We do not understand why it is not included- but we want it!

This blog is pretty brief on a very broad subject.  I am testing the waters to see how many users out there comment and are looking for some input on this subject. I hope to hear back from you guys on what is working for you with Workflow Rules and possibly being able to help one another!