Field Guide to Programmers

Wow, and I thought I was the only one who ran my business like I was writing code!

I just found this wonderful little post from Eric Sink about managing the little quirks that happen in business and muses on the idea that exception handling might be the answer…

Exception Handling in Running a Business:

I think one of the toughest parts of running a business is dealing with all the exceptions.  These things never get much attention at the genesis of a company.  We write our business plan and we try to figure out how we’re going to handle everything from customer issues to staffing issues to bugs to parking.  But then life hands us a diversity of circumstances we never expected.

[Via: Eric.Weblog()]

Now, I have a people of all stripes on my team: marketing, merchandising, creative, content, analysis, and of course tech. Yet, as my background is tech, I tend to handle most of what I do as if I were just running a rather eccentric software group. This probably drives people a little batty at times, but in general it’s fun and we’re highly productive.

So, how do you run a business with exception handling?

When making a decision, try to determine the following:

• Can the effects be contained?
• Can the decision be reversed?
• What is the potential impact of the situation? (large/small)

Most people would put the impact at the top of the list. I have it as #3 because if you can contain the risk and/or reverse it, you might be in a good spot to go after the “big game”.

In E-Commerce, you can usually say YES to #1 and #2 which automatically means that you’ve lessened the risk for #3. This is the heart of multivariate testing and segmentation. Try a few little things, measure the impact, roll it out to the larger audience.

But as Eric points out, managing people can also give you opportunities for exception handling. Here is one of his examples:

One of your staff needs to have surgery but they’ve used up all their leave days.

This might easily be “one of your staff would like to work at home but your company has a policy against that” or something similar. Again, I usually fall back on the three questions above and find that it’s easy to contain a situation like this and that a one-off decision of this nature can be viewed as a “test” and therefore you can always reverse yourself after the fact.

I realize this all sounds good in theory. In reality, explaining exceptions to people can be difficult because they often look like arbitrary decisions. The only advice I have here is try to be consistent and clear, make sure that people understand your thought process (where you can obviously - confidentiality and all that).