Check, and re-Check

Our topic today is a situation and suggestion for one of the daily challenges you may face as a young professional.

When working with multiple teams and stakeholder, you will have to either share information and data or receive some. You will need to always re-check what was sent. Now as silly as this sounds, hear me out.

You’re swamped with tasks when another one is sent to you and for that you need data from another team. You send an email and get back to your other tasks, a few days later you send a reminder. A few more days later you send another reminder. A week later while preparing for an important presentation, you receive the data, you thank your colleague and get back to your presentation. A few days after that, once your presentation is done and all is well, you open the file to start working on this task, but low and behold the data is either missing some parts, in a format you cannot use, or for a wrong client.

You’re upset, angry, how could they send you wrong data? On top of that, now its you’re tight on time, submission is either too close or that person is not reachable. What do you do ? Well, I’ve actually been in such a position before, and I’ve heard from others whom shared the dreadful experience, whom wished they were made aware that not everyone will understand your requests as you’ve intended them to be.

Short Term Fix:

• Option A: Ideally, if it’s possible reach out to the person that sent the data and explain what needs to be changed and how urgent it is, and that you honestly didn’t have a chance to check the data till now. Explain calmly the situation and thank them in advance for their help. Don’t rely on email for this, either call or talk to them in person.
• Option B: If the person who sent the data is on holiday or unreachable, check with a team member and explain the situation.
• Option C: If there’s a data system which other teams use or you can use, log in to it and try to get the data yourself or ask for another team’s help.

Now you can imagine this is not ideal, it causes extra hours of unnecessary work and following up with multiple people, so we need to work on a long term solution as well.

Long Term Solution:

• Whenever you receive documents or files, open them and check they are what you need, as trivial as this sounds those 5-10 mins checking the documents would save you a few hours later if something is missing.
• If you’re going to receive many documents, open and check they are the multiple ones and not a copy sent by mistake of the first one (yes as silly as it sounds it does happen)
• For Data specifically, when sending the request, what would be greatly helpful is if you add a sample sheet or file of what format is needed and which data goes where (you’ll thank me later).
• Still data is the tricky one, because a lot of times even if you open and check that you have the correct data, when you actually start working on it you may notice issues that weren’t evident before. The only solution for that is to take 30 mins end of the same day, open the file with the data, and try to work with it and see if anything is missing or doesn’t make sense.
• Once all of that is done, thank the person whom shared the above with you, and set the expectation that you’ll probably come back with questions in the next few days or ask for support in case something is something, and who to reach out to in that case. So if worst case scenario happens, that person would expect that you’d be reaching out and would either be there to support or brief another team member before going on holidays.

These are some tips that worked for me in the past, and I continue to use them today.

I’m sure however there’s more tips and suggestion that we could all benefit from, so let me know in the comments !

Till next time 🙂 !