Telecom Expense Management “Work Hacks”

Work hacks, those genius, unique “jimmy-rigged” solutions, or “workarounds” that are an ineffective cheap approach to solving a repeatable problem or requirement to your daily job.

Most work hacks are created because the pre-existing application doesn’t bring together information or processes that employees require to effectively perform their daily duties.  So, what do we do, we develop a work hack.  Why? Because 1 – who has the time 2 – who has the budget and 3 – There’s no clue on how the business can implement something else with all the other tool, processes and hacks that are already have in place today.

Work hacks and hand up, we’ve all done or used them before:

• The impressive email, team share drive folder, filing system you’ve established with wannabe Google search engine key word search capabilities that 90% of the time never returns or finds the information you’re looking for.

• The excel spreadsheet that your office “excel guru” hack together to keep track of an unsurmountable set of data with formulas and macros linked to other sets of workbooks that if anyone tries to use or inputs the wrong data into the wrong cell their PC crashes without fail!!

• The application suite you open in the morning to start your day that makes you and your cube mates feel like you work in the NASA control center.

• The plethora of Google spreadsheets used to “collaborate as a team on” to manage team request, business updates, and budgets, linked to 1 master workbook to manage it all that is “magically” suppose to automatically update but never actually works because there’s always missing info.

• The application that you purchased to buy office supplies that you’ve hacked into something that it’s not 100% not designed to do. “Well if we all agree to refer to it by this and use this field to capture that, yeah it should work.”

Sounds familiar?

For most people when they manage their telecom category or join an organization we just sort of dive in and evolve into the workplace culture.  (e.g. We access and use whatever existing processes, applications, or pre-existing work-hacks that are established or like a genius, come up with our own hacks and just get on with it as it relates to our role.)

Obviously not all applications are bad but usually applications are purchased for a specific need e.g. finance SAP or a contract data base application and we’re told “you must use it” and business processes are just that processes that must be followed as part of management mandates.

The challenge of managing telecom with hacks is overtime you struggle to piece together the bigger picture of what makes up the entire category of spend. Savings opportunities are missed and delivering against work objectives becomes difficult as a result of all of the hacks involved to answer what should be simple questions (e.g. what’s the current status of our projects and order delivery dates, what services are out of contract, what’s our current cost per meg, how much spend do we have with our top vendors, what are our non-performing services that missed SLA last month etc.)

You’re probably thinking I can answer that! But think about the work processes (data sources, people and hacks) you have to go through to obtain the answer. Can you answer the question in seconds or minutes with confidence the results are correct?

Most businesses can at best limp by with work hacks.  However, at some point typically in your 3rd or 5th year, most employees find themselves in 3 places:

1. Knee deep in hack manure.

2- Find themselves in a bad mouthing pep-rally about how comical the process is.

3. So feed up over the frustration they’re pinging their mates on LinkedIn for a job only to learn their hack is no better or at best par.

Temforce was founded and built by someone who lived these problems and their own self-profound work hacks for years. Temforce fulfills the gap in technology that helps organizations handle their telecom category portfolio i.e. project demand, inventory, suppliers and spend without having to settle for lackluster applications and hacks. Temforce is built for speed and agility to get the job finished fast to free you to do more valuable planning and optimization work.  To put it simply, Temforce is a better way to manage your telecom vs. the hack.

At some point you have to question, yeah why do we do it this way? Or say enough and take action to improve things.

Be a change agent and start the movement #ditchthehack

Temforce – Category Management SaaS enabling teams to manage their Telecom, IT Categories and Suppliers through 1 easy to use application.