Organizing And Tracking Your Team's Tasks

Dear Import/Export Compliance Manager,

There are other departments at my company like technical support and customer service that utilize software to associate their e-mails with distinct tasks or cases and track them in a central database.  Those are bigger departments with lots of input/output.  I, on the other hand, run a small import/export compliance department and am wondering whether such a thing would be beneficial for us.  What say you?

Kicking It in Kansas City

Dear Kicking It,

Good question.  It depends.

So for anyone not familiar with these databases, the idea is that you can have a database that tracks specific interactions, such as handling a technical support call.  A customer calls in with a problem and speaks to a technical support person.  This interaction, as well as any other interactions such as e-mails, instant messages, etc. are assigned a single case number and are tracked by this case number until the issue has been resolved.  E-mails sent in support of the case may have the case number embedded in the e-mail somewhere, such as the title or at the end, so the software automatically stores it in its proper place.  Any anyone in Technical Support can log into the database and see what’s been going on with the issue.

When done well, this is an excellent method of keeping a department with, as you say, high amounts of input and output, organized.  Technical Support, Customer Service, Inside Sales and any department that deals with customers, potential customers and even internal customers on a large scale would probably find such software useful. 

Small import/export compliance departments typically doesn’t see a high volume of requests, say for screening entities, dealing with end use statements or approving shipments.  Creating and implementing your own version of these databases, even if it’s a replication of what other departments are doing, can be an enormous endeavor that sucks up your and the IT Department’s time. 

So why would you do it?  The Import/Export Compliance Manager can think of three reasons to do so:

1.       You and your team are unable to be organized with regard to incoming requests. 

2.       Other departments need better visibility into what your team is working on.

3.       You need to justify additional headcount.

Let’s address each in turn.  Most departments have group e-mails and maybe you’re having trouble with certain e-mails not being answered or two people attempting to deal with the same issue.  A system would solve this, as the e-mail would go into the database and then need to be claimed by someone from your team, as the owner.  This would label it as theirs so no one else touches it unless asked.  It would also, by throwing uncategorized e-mails into a queue in the system, note if any are being missed.  A simpler method of being organized, though, is to use a group e-mail inbox, where someone on your team takes ownership of an e-mail in the box by dragging and dropping it into their own folder.  Much less work involved, both upfront and downstream.  So basically having a big system would be best-in-class but also would take extra work.

As for visibility, well, the Import/Export Compliance Manager is not in favor of departments being a black box, where e-mails go in and, sometimes, e-mails mysteriously come back out.  Having one of these systems with other departments having read-only access can easily show them what is going on with a particular issue, especially their own, and even give them e-mail alerts when something has been done.  The Import/Export Compliance Manager wouldn’t say this is a typical need of other departments but perhaps that’s just based on his experience.

The third potential reason to push for such a systematic solution is to justify headcount.  There’s the old quote, “What gets measured, gets managed.”  If your team is underwater with regard to day-to-day workload, you want to be able to show that with numbers, both to yourself and to your management.  It may be difficult to state that X number of requests per person per day is too much but it is not as difficult to say that the number of requests is going up.  Most upper management of non-Legal departments like seeing color-coded graphs and charts, as this is typically a very quick way of imparting information.  A graph showing which types of issues your department is handling, the volume of those issues, what other departments or customers are involved and the time it takes to resolve an issue not only provides a decent picture of what’s going on in a typically difficult-to-understand department but also shows that you, as a manager, are organized and competent.  Both should help in justifying additional headcount and showing what type of headcount is necessary. 

If none of the above are true, Kicking It, then the Import/Export Compliance Manager’s advice is not to touch it with a 10-foot pole.  Utilize IT resources for all of the other projects that you’re waiting on instead.  Good luck!