I once heard you talk about an ‘action audit’, so what is an ‘action audit’?
An action audit is actually looking at the functional activities that you perform in your business environment although as we’ve spoken of or alluded to, it can also be in a personal environment, but the business activities you do.
For instance in my case, just today, it’s Monday morning and I was paying the staff for their efforts last week. Then there was a period of time when I was following up on some marketing calls from last week so I was doing marketing activities. There was some money that had come in through the post so I was looking at some accounting issues for depositing revenues. All of those are my business activities and what we need to do before we can AutoVate those activities is at least we need to record them and measure them so that we know how much time is spent in a typical week on the activities that I perform or you perform.
Once we know the amount of time that we spend and we use that key figure we arrived at in our last session, the true value of a productive hour, we can then put a value for all of the business activities that we do during the week. That audit then allows us to look and see how much time and money - Time Value of all of our activities we do during the week and then we can rank order them from the most expensive time items to the least expensive.
And the actual action management process in doing that, I know in your seminars you said that there was a breakdown?
What we are trying to do with AutoVation is clearly analyse the highest time and value activities and look if there are ways to reduce those through automation or innovation. Now in the automation space we look at a cost benefit analysis between employing automation tools to reduce those activities. Alternatively if we’re unable to use an automation tool then we need to look at the possibility of outsourcing the activity or alternatively delegating that activity to somebody who has a less expensive time cost number, or actually eliminating the task altogether.
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