Did you know, that in Slovakia, there is just 19% of companies, who are sending reminders about overdue invoices to their business partners?
According the EOS survey with European Payment Practices 2019, the level of digitalization of processes is steadily climbing, however even such simple task as a remind your customer, that there are some overdue invoices, is done only in 19% of companies in our country.
This made me wondering: how hard can it be? We have all the data, so where’s the catch? We are SW developers, after all – why just 19%?
It took us one weekend (and few evenings to polish things) and our own solution was deployed into production – with not only the email notification, but also with integration into MS Teams, where you can ask a bot to produce a report containing overdue invoices whenever you want.
Few notes, which I got from the trainings I had in one of my former jobs. It was about the way on how to lead people.
Generic principle is displayed in following table:
Wants
Doesn’t want
Knows
Delegate
Involve
Doesn’t know
Command
Convince
The table is describing situations, in which we often find ourselves, where we need to deal with certain person (or group of people). This person either knows/doesn’t know to do this thing, or wants/doesn’t want to do it. Based on this knows/wants status, different strategy shall be used in order to work this person.
Knows/Wants
Simplest case – your partner (colleague, employee, friend …) – wants to do this thing and has all the skills necessary.
In this case it is simplest to just delegate the entire effort on this person.
Everything else is just unnecessary waste of effort.
Knows/Doesn’t want
In this case the person is able to fulfill this particular task, but for some reason is not willing to do it. Either he is not satisfied with the result, or with the thing itself, or whatever else.
The smartest thing to do in this case is to involve this person to it.
Ask for his/hers opinion and seriously listen what they are saying, or ask him to do just small portion of the entire thing – when he will see the results, or during the work he will see, that his doubts are gone, he might end up in the Knows/Wants category
Doesn’t know/Wants
This time the person is willing to do the job, he is just lacking necessary information or skills.
You will help him, when you will command him.
By commanding I mean giving him more precise instructions on how to proceed, how to do this thing. Depending on the person’s skills, those command might be pretty detailed – but as the time will pass and the person will get the necessary skills, also the commands won’t need to be that detailed.
Doesn’t know/Doesn’t want
Hardest case, but also not uncommon. In this case it leaves you with single option – you need to convince this person/people.
Either by involving them in part of this endeavor, with which they do agree, or by providing more details, more data (when it is quantifiable, hard numbers and some analysis do help in such cases).
Some incentives are necessary in this case – either by satisfaction of seeing some results, or by realization, that this thing needs to be done, because something external is convincing enough, so they see it.
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