The "Pain Point" Method

You know what everyone is good at? Telling you what sucks about their technology. I have yet to meet a single person who couldn't very quickly bring to mind five or ten pain points in their day-to-day workflow that drive them crazy. Literally everyone has these.

• This system doesn't talk to that system, and we have to manually enter everything twice.
• This is supposed to work but it doesn't for our specific need
• We can't get the data we need out of our systems
• We don't know when something goes wrong until it's too late
• Our current solution takes 30 steps when we only really need 5

And this is where the hacks and temporary fixes come in.

Well... they were supposed to be temporary, but actually we've been using this temporary solution for 5 years now.

-- Everyone ever

How It Works

When we first meet with customers, the very first thing we do is a "Pain Point" analysis. There's no magic to it. We sit down with our customers and ask them to tell us their pain points. Usually this process uncovers gaps in the various systems that a company uses. And what we've found is that once you get folks talking about what isn't working well, it starts with a trickle and ends with a flood.

Now all this talk of what doesn't work well could easily be mistaken for complaining. In fact, at least half the time, when some of the employees start talking about pain points, they sheepishly look around at the faces in the room to see if they are allowed to say the things they are about to say. And once they understand that it's safe to do this and that we actually want to hear as many of these as possible, there is a bit of an epic emotional release that occurs. This is where we get a really good list of things that need to be automated, streamlined, and documented.

The most common phrase from our customers during a pain point analysis is:

There's probably nothing we can do about this, but...

So far, we haven't found a pain point that has no solution, and actually... most of them have several solutions. And as we explain some of the possible solutions, this brings even more opportunities for improvement to mind.

The whole process is what we like to call a "Virtuous Cycle" where one positive improvement leads to another and so on.

We've seen this work with small companies with just a few employees and no technical folks all the way up to companies with hundreds of employees who have multiple programming teams and a full IT staff.

Ready to conquer your pain points? Schedule a free meeting with us today and kickstart your journey towards a more efficient, streamlined workflow. Don't hesitate, reach out now and embrace the power of the virtuous cycle.