Solve Small Problems

A couple of days ago I asked my bosses to solve a problem. There was some mess in company’s official papers. I described the problem, not trying to blame anyone, although I can guess who responsible for that. A reaction disappointed me a bit. Generally I was pointed that there are more important issue to deal with at the time.

Sure, there are. I’m aware of most of them. Alas, for now it’s hard to find a quick solution for them. On the other hand, a resolution of the issue I was describing was quick and rather easy. I believe it would be enough to talk with the people responsible for the mess, asking them to be more careful with their actions. In that case nothing happened. I see the same mess day by day. Frustrating.

Frustrating, because when you can’t solve big problems, you should at least take care about smaller ones. It pays off because small problems tend to grow over time and, when unmanaged, they often become big ones which you are no longer able to deal with.

If you don’t care about minor misunderstandings within the team they’ll grow up until they’ll become conflicts and finally you’ll ruin atmosphere in the team. When you don’t care about minor issues in relations with vendors they’ll become major issues and finally you’ll have a problem with hardware deliveries. When you don’t care about mess in official papers mess will grow until finally you’ll find printed payroll laying next to printer open for general use. I guess none of them is something the management would like to deal with. Why don’t they eager to deal with early symptoms then?

It’s like risk management. It isn’t limited to project management. You should do it on every level of business management.