I hate to burst your bubble but your 2018 targets may already be in trouble. If your targets are anything like mine, they show improvements quarter to quarter throughout the year. Here at Decisions we’ve had record growth in the last two years at over 60% per year and we have an incredible pipeline. So why am I worried?

As leaders and managers in our organizations, it’s our responsibility to continuously improve our processes, products and services. There is no standing pat. There’s not an organization in the world that starts a new year saying we want to just keep what we are doing right now and not change a thing. Through wage inflation and competition we need to improve on our performance simply to achieve flat results let alone grow. Which is why we are all right now looking at 2018 targets that are a significant stretch from where we finished 2017.

Join me for a moment as we work through a thought exercise together for a typical process automation project. Let’s jump into a time machine to next December and look back on the year that just passed. To hit our annual targets as planned we needed a couple quarters running at improved efficiencies so it’s a good thing that we were fully operational with our new automated process in June. It’s also a good thing that in order to be operational in June we were testing and training in May. Furthermore, it’s a good thing we started development in March. Working back even further, it’s a good thing we completed our project planning, scoping and team building in February.

It’s also important that we got the project scoped, sold internally, funded and approved in January.

Are you starting to worry yet?

Happy New Year!