In the course of our day, problems inevitably turn up – such as quality failures, safety hazards, customer complaints, environmental impacts and so on.

If we don’t get on top of these issues then pretty soon we are ‘fire-fighting’ – fires start just as quickly as we put them out.

To move beyond fire-fighting, businesses need a clear process for dealing with problems. The process we use for this is the ‘Issues Process’.

The Issues Process brings all the issues of the business into one place and provides a simple way of prioritizing the issues that need solving first. The process guides us to find the root cause of problems and put in place solutions that prevent their reoccurrence. Further, the process ensures staff check their solutions are working before declaring the issue resolved.

It’s hard work initially, but it’s never as hard as the endless fire-fight. Pretty soon the fires go out, problems get resolved and time is freed up to improve the business and the bottom line.