Cheat Sheets

Let me lay out a common scenario for you, one that occurs hundreds of times a day in this country. One of your employees, Sally, checks her email. To her horror, a message pops up on the screen saying “ATTENTION! WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED. DELETE FAILED. QUARANTINE SUCCESSFUL.” Sally has never seen a message like this before. Like most office workers, she can operate her computer effectively, but when something goes wrong she gets very nervous. She pulls away from the keyboard and panics.

She yells over to the next cubicle “Hey Bob, can you come look at this?”  Bob, whose computer knowledge is only about ten percent better than Sally’s, hops over to her computer and takes a look.  “I’ve got a virus!” Sally screams.

“Well,” says Bob, “It says ‘successful’.”

“What do I do?” asks Sally.

“Well,” guesses Bob, “It says successful, so I think you’re probably OK.”

“Are you sure?” Sally asks, wild-eyed.

“Well, no”, muses Bob, “It says ‘failed’ in there too.  Uh....maybe you should call Dan, the IT guy.”

“God, I hope I didn’t screw anything up,” exclaims Sally. 

Several cubicles over, Joe picks up on the conversation.  He stops what he’s doing and bolts over to Sally’s desk  Joe, whose computer knowledge is only about twenty percent better than Sally’s, puffs out his chest and says, “The anti-virus has quarantined the file, Sally.  Just hit OK and you’ll be fine.  You don’t need to call Dan.”

“Are you sure?” Sally asks, quaking.

“Of course I am.  Just do it.” says Joe, doing his best to look like James Bond.   

Sally sheepishly clicks the OK button on the virus message.  Instantly, another message pops up and says “WARNING!  VIRUS DETECTED IN FILE deleteallyourdata.exe.  ACCESS DENIED.  DELETE FAILED.  QUARANTINE SUCCESSFUL.” 

“Oh my God,” screams Sally, “If my documents are all gone I am so dead!  I don’t have a backup of these anywhere!”

“Uh, Maybe we should call Dan,” says Bob.

“Well, let me try this…” says Joe. 

…and on it goes.  Now you have three employees standing around, not doing any work, fussing with a computer error that is completely harmless.  How much money is your company spending to have them stand around?  How much work is not getting done?  How much stress is this causing?  What if this kind of thing happened several times a day in your company?  Guess what?  It probably does! 

Let’s take the scenario again.  This time, Sally’s company likes productivity, happy employees, and really high return on technology investment.  Sally, checks her email.  To her horror, a message pops up on the screen saying “ATTENTION!  WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED.  DELETE FAILED.  QUARANTINE SUCCESSFUL.”  Sally has never seen a message like this before, but she has a sheet of paper tacked to her wall (her supervisor made her tack it there) that says “What to do if you get a virus message”. 

She quickly reads on the sheet that if the message says either “delete successful” or “quarantine successful”, there is no danger whatsoever, and she can hit OK.  The sheet also warns her she might get this message more than once and that’s completely normal and safe.  Sally clicks OK, clicks OK again, and goes right back to work.   

No disruption in her work flow.  No wasting the time of other employees.  No stress for Sally.  Sally’s company has just made a bunch of money. 

That sheet on Sally’s wall could offer other information too.  It could state that if the message said both “delete failed” and “quarantine failed”, than she should call Dan at extension 446.  It could also tell her what to do in case of common errors in the company database that she uses.  It could also give her the proper procedures for shutting down her computer, logging in to certain systems, how to forward her email when she’s out of town, and so on. 

Documented computer procedures that are simple, easily read, plainly visible and/or easy to access save a company piles of money and employee stress.  Pick out several of your more experienced employees and ask them what kinds of problems/errors/issues regularly come up, and make a what-to-do cheat sheet that is tacked to everyone’s wall.  Include key phone numbers and extensions too.  You will glean huge returns for the small amount of time this takes. 

Do it for Sally.  And do it for yourself.

Caleb Jones www.calebjones.com >Click to Email Caleb< 888.646.TECH Please download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader if you don't have it installed on your computer. The Adobe Acrobat Reader will allow you to view, and print all of our documents, across all major computing platforms.