Improvement Insights Blog
When You’re Stuck – Hire Help
Most of us are hesitant to admit that we don’t know how to do something. So we can waste a lot of time trying to learn how. But in business, that’s a foolish waste of time and money. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“Like many other people, I have a hard time asking for help. The other day, I was trying to work on something for our website: it was a process link to go out to the United Postal Service and get the Zip Plus 4 thing. I looked at all of their documentation. I thought I knew that it was working and I kept trying to make it work and it just wouldn’t work; it just kept coming back “boolean false.” Wrong answer, Jay. I thought, “Okay, what am I going to do about this?”
“So, what did I do? Well, I talked myself into going out and finding somebody out there on the internet to look at the code, paid them a hundred bucks to do it. They turned it around in an hour. It’s working perfectly. That saves me dozens of hours of farting around with their stupid code that has terrible examples on it.
“So that’s one of the things I want you to think about: there are experts out there. If you’re struggling with data, maybe you should send it to us and see if we will (for a fee) will come in and see something you can’t see, and see it in a timely fashion so that you can get on with making results.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: When you’re stuck, hire help, right? “Hire when it hurts” is what they always say. I usually get to the point where it hurts too much and then I hire somebody online to help me with whatever code gadget I need.
“Let’s create a hassle-free America; hassle-free healthcare. Let us know if we can help you with your data. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
