Issues With Small Product Company

At present I am working in a small product company which is actually adding value in itself by acquiring other small companies from the market. I guess in this growing economy of world this is normal trend going on.

But this small company has its own issues of functioning, after working here I realized so many things and also learned from them a lot. So that when I would open my own small company I should not repeat those kinds of mistakes.

Actually most of the mistakes here happening are operational rather than technical. Few of them were technical mistakes but that were been fixed by doing some hiring for technical experts from market. Let me list out the mistakes company is still doing and might be in future also if they don’t get the clue at this point of time.

Office Management Issues:
1. We only have one person responsible for managing day to day office operation. The guy is also responsible for managing finance and other stuff related to employees. This person itself is kind of slow mover and hence all execution automatically goes slow.
In result people got frustrated with the way operation is being managed.
2. Not summarizing other person during handover of responsibility in case of vacation. This is a real issue that is creating lot of confusion to people who works in the organization. As they don’t know who will be responsible during absence of other person.
3. Although this is more of handling issue with outsourced company but it affects the people anyway. We have outsourced two operations to other companies, first is, IT and another is Finance. But in case of emergency we really don’t follow them badly. Situation has improved a lot after hiring a fulltime IT Administrator. But in case of finance it is still a required thing.

Office Operation Issues:
1. Lack of second authorized person officially who will be responsible in case first person goes for vacation. Actually case is being happened with both positions, first at operating officer level as well as office manager level. Situation got worsen in case both goes out of town for some other official work.
2. Lack of delegation of responsibility to senior people in the company. Actually here few people are very senior and can handle few other operation than their technical abilities. But they would never volunteer for this unless has been asked for. The reason behind this is, giving responsibility without authority. As everyone know this is more fatal than having none of them.

So there are the various operation issues I realized till now. But I think performing these operation in India is little different than other developed country. As here we are still need to develop the working attitude rather than being dependent on follow-ups heavily.

Getting help from Customer Care

Usually we say that, now things are moving really fast due to usage of technology. Things like banking, telecommunication process has improved a lot in true sense. But even few people who i guess don't want to change their attitude or they are very reluctant to the usage of new technology, impacting this fast pace change in the service are.

I was trying to retrieve the online banking userid/password from the Standard Chartered bank since last four months, But i could not get the success. There might be several reason behind that, but what i found during this whole followup process was, people who were responsible for these activities were not having enough experience in the area they were providing services. They were just following the instruction from their superior blindly without raising concern.

Anyway one fine day i finally able to catch a guy who was really having knowledge about the system. He helped me on that and finally i was able to get the idea for resolving the issue. But i think we really need to change our way of working at least for service sector. As i believe service is the area where customer directly interact with the person, and set his mind about the company based on his/her response.

So i can only hope that might be after few years, we would be able to improve in this area also.