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Back in Beijing for 2nd day – and busy like a beaver trying to get things organized.
My main thrust is to get a consistent and reliable system to ensure that:
- Projects are captured
- Projects are done.
Simple thing – and on the surface it would appear a thing of simplicity – however, with over 100 projects going at the same time, with various people, ensuring execution is a challenge. In the days when I was doing 100 hour weeks – in some ways things seemed simpler. I had my to do list, and I hammered at it till it went down. When you now have others doing the work, the skill set to manage is significantly differently – it’s a game of tracking, measuring, etc.
Currently my biggest issues continue to be Finance and Accounting. Its been a frustrating road, since we are almost at the place, ALMOST, where monthly P&L’s are issues, journal entries are done and reconciliations are completed. ALMOST. But, not quite there yet. And so, every day that there is another finance issue that comes up, I find myself very short on energy to deal with. But, I have now brought on a consultant to hammer out the SOP’s for Finance and Accounting, a calendar of reports and tasks is getting put together and procedures in place to make it all hum. So, we have done well given how far back I was 2 years ago, and give the mess I had to fix. BUT, ahhh – I want it to be just done and working. I’m so looking forward to deep dive into RedStores Ventures but I continue to be pulled into the operational details of Finance. Ok, deep breath! 
Its coming and I will have it humming soon.
On the up side, Ventures is looking very hot. We hired a new designer and have a very nice new
fresh design. Its hitting the kind of look I would hope for. Backend is coming along. The current state of the site is here:
http://dev.redstores.com/xcart/Household/
On a personal organization note, I have switch my task tracking to a 4 tier tracking – Important/Urgent, Important/NonUrgent, NotImportant/Urgent, Not Important/ Not Urgent. I find it now, for the way I’m working, that this has better allowed me to focus on top priorities. I have also been using the GTD outlook plugin, which allows me automatically setup follow ups and reminders for emails I send out – which has helped me a great deal in tracking things. My item count is VERY small now, as I spend the day today putting all the tasks off my sheet into our Sharepoint system and assigning them.
So, for this week – my goals are rather simple –
- Set Goals and Expectations and tracking for Finance
- Setup a strong task/project tracking SOP/Policy and tie it to peoples compensation.
- Revise the KPA – Key Performance Assessment System
If I can get these three things done this week, then the week will be a success.
