As I’m am becoming responsible for more and more websites I am realizing how much time is needed for maintenance. I am not used to this since my previous life was more about forging ahead and forgetting the problems. They figure themselves out anyways, right?
But now this is my show, and I am seeing the importance of looking around at the current situation and asking myself, “If I don’t address this now, what are the potential long-term effects it can have?”
Today we’ll talk about maintaining and improving daily operations. There are opportunities to grow our business right under our noses if we just stop to take a whiff of what’s going on internally.
WordPress Updates
If you’ve run a website you know what I’m talking about, especially a WordPress site. When creating a website and installing WordPress through the hosting package, I am basically installing a template that I am familiar with so I can build the site faster and easier (for me at least).
But WordPress (which is technically a company called Automattic) operates in a very unique way, I talked about it after I read The Year Without Pants
. They make updates to their software on a constant basis. They don’t need to tell people about it, they don’t need to make announcements about it, they just do it.
. They make updates to their software on a constant basis. They don’t need to tell people about it, they don’t need to make announcements about it, they just do it.Once they make the improvements and changes on the back end of their software, we (WordPress users) get a little notification that we need to update the site. We get these notifications anywhere from WordPress as well as all the plugins that we install on the site as well. These update notifications can happen anywhere from once a day to once a week, depending on how many plugins are installed.
With Improvements Comes Measurements
When these changes are made via WordPress on the back end of a website, sometimes nothing happens to the aesthetics and the user will never know. Other times, the entire format of the site gets shifted and something has to be done to correct it.
Since this is technology we’re talking about, nothing ever goes completely according to plan, there are always hiccups. So anytime I update my site, I always do a backup of all software. If something happens and I lose all my information when updating the site, I am covered and I can just re-install the files without starting from scratch.
So anytime I need to update my site it takes time to backup, then do the updates, and then I need to go and check to see what changes have been made on the back end as well as the front end. And in the worst case scenario, major “improvements” create more work for me to correct back to the way I designed them.
Lean Manufacturing
In the world of lean manufacturing, there are constant improvements being made. The beauty of the Kaizen philosophy (which literally means “improvement” or “change for the best”) is continuous improvement. This applies to lean manufacturing processes as well as lean startup principles I talked about yesterday.
If a company believes in Kaizen, they make constant improvements (not just change for change’s sake – very different) to their systems. They see an opportunity for change, they make a quick decision about it to test out the change, if it works they keep it, if it doesn’t they move on. Since they’re constantly testing, they are constantly monitoring and doing maintenance.
In most companies this is more along the lines of what it looks like: talk about change, and then have meetings about change, and then change the change, then implement half of the intended change, resulting in very little improvement to the process. And then the final step is to complain about the change that didn’t improve anything.
If you are going to maintain your business, make it purposeful! If your company resembles the latter of these, question the process. Why are we making these changes? Why are we doing this maintenance? What are we looking to improve/get out of this process?
If you (or someone in your organization) cannot answer that question, it’s probably a waste of time. I know for the websites I’m operating, when I do maintenance on them, I am keeping the sites running fast and looking for ways to improve the UX (user experience) on the front end of the site.
A Fresh Perspective
What I enjoy about updating my site is the way I am forced to look at it from a different perspective. As I said before, I come from a background of the “forge ahead, we’ll fix it later/never” mentality. This is totally different, and it challenges me.
Once per two weeks-ish I have to stop, take a deep breath, analyze what changes I’ve made and carve out an hour (or more) to look at my work. Do I like the new plugins? Is that page necessary? What can I do about this weird looking side bar? Is my site running too slow?
When I stop to analyze the site, I am analyzing the business so I can make improvements to it. This is an invaluable lesson that many businesses do not implement.
It may sound odd, but I’m glad I’ve had to slow down to do maintenance on my site. Too often we, as business people, get hung up on the daily work that we forget to improve what we have. Or we only look for opportunities externally, like new clients, instead of looking for ways to improve relations with current clients and cut costs internally.
What sort of maintenance do you perform on your business? Is it a routine or do you look to improve your business while maintaining it?
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Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter about how your business maintains and/or improves its operations, I’d love to hear from you.
Have a great day!
