Tracking Follow-up Items and Establishing Company SLAs

Do you have trouble remembering what you’ve asked others to do (delegation) and getting timely responses from your co-workers? I have a suggestion (of course!).

In David Allen’s oh-so-popular Getting Things Done book he illustrates how one should create a “Waiting For” e-mail folder. I think this is a great idea. Let’s take a a step beyond just a folder though.

If everyone in your department/team/company keeps one of these, it can be used in a regular daily/weekly meeting to ensure timely follow-up from others.

Get everyone together in a room and tell them to bring a print out of the e-mail folder. Go around the room and ask each person to list who is waiting on a response and from whom.

If you do this each week, it should help projects stay on track and foster collaboration. Of course, the size of the group meeting should be kept small in order to keep the meeting times short.

One topic that will inevitably come up is “your priority is not my priority” in relation to response times. I suggest creating a form of Service Level Agreement (SLA) between co-workers. Everyone should be able to answer an e-mail within one business day. If you do not provide the answer or requested comment within a day, let people know when you will. In this example, the SLA is “one business day”.

An SLA will help ease the uncertainty that arises with co-workers who are slow to respond to e-mail. (in fact, take this beyond e-mail — voice mail should be included, too.)