We all have them in our business and private life – processes which happen automatically without our intervention.
Some are not under our control, such as the monthly or quarterly bills and statements we get. Because of the infrequent arrival of these, we don’t usually notice if one’s missing (lost in the post), and it isn’t usually a critical ‘failure’.
Other automated processes can be more of a problem if they don’t happen – automatic payments to the utilities or our credit card. We have some control over these … ensuring there are funds in the account to cover the payment. If the fault isn’t ours, we’re often protected by the Direct Debit guarantees.
But what about those automatic processes which are our responsibility?
There is a temptation, entirely human and understandable, to set up an automatic process and then forget it.
Unfortunately, the natural state of atrophy is likely to affect your automatic process eventually. If you don’t check periodically, how will you know they are still running? Perhaps most important of all, what are the consequences when an automatic process fails?
In this technological world, some of the most important but least checked and used automatic processes are our data backups.
We have a multi-layered backup strategy involving synchronised copying (as soon as files are created or changed), a traditional timed backup schedule creating periodic snap-shots, and an online backup service to ensure our data is not only stored off-site but on another continent!
The synchronisation is easy to monitor as a little icon in the system tray changes whenever the sync process kicks in.
The timed backup process can be checked by looking for the latest file in the backup folder. Or we can set up an email notification, and that’s a bit like receiving (or not) a bank statement. But note: this isn’t checking we can actually restore from it!
The Carbonite online backup runs from a PC we use as a file store, and it runs in the background when network and Internet usage is low. We don’t often look at this PC, as long as it is on and the fan is humming. So how do we know if this process is running? If we don’t check, we don’t know. Fortunately, Carbonite emails if there’s been no activity for a week. This is one of the reasons we recommend Carbonite … and their cost per gigabyte can be very low – we’re currently paying $1.20 per GB per annum, 1/20th of a quote from a local company!
So what’s the answer?
We have whiteboard with a list of our tasks and projects – there’s a space on it for those we have to repeat every day, week or month. Trouble is, we don’t always look at it when we’re really busy.
We also use calendars on our PCs … Outlook and SugarCRM … to prompt for meetings, one-off and repetitive tasks.
Another ‘automatic’ process, I’m afraid! Let me know if you can think of something more foolproof.
