There's nothing worse as a Business Owner or Manager than seeing Staff working hard but working on tasks that don't really achieve anything positive for the business. Its work that needs to be done but is repetitive and ideally should be automated. It slows your team down and stops them from working on tasks that provide direct value to you and your customers.

Stop doing this busy work by automating it. If you can't automate it using off the shelf software, an option is to get software developed for the task. An example of the elimination of busy work is the invoicing process of one of our Clients. Their invoicing process involved summarizing the costs to the client but also including a set of job notes and images taken during the course of the work. The images were often taken by outsourced staff and were often at a very high resolution which was not suitable for inclusion in the Word based invoice documents as it bloated the file sizes to sometimes greater than 10 megabytes. Their Clients would only accept invoice documents that were in the order of 1MB of size but still required the images included.

All of this resulted in Staff time spent manually preparing the invoice documents by selectively marking aspects of the job notes in bold,ensuring that the address information was always two lines long, editing out sections that weren't needed and then manipulating images so that they were still included but the resulting invoice document was not too large. We extended their existing software system to automate this process so that no manual actions were needed but the resulting invoice documents still matched their existing practice and Client's requirements.