What are your TMF Resolutions?

January 2, 2018

Why do we make resolutions?

The idea of starting over with the New Year is an attractive one. After a long year, it’s human nature to detour into bad habits or lose sight of the incremental steps necessary to reach an important goal.

But what are the resolutions we all have in common?

Since we are LMK, we decided to research some resolution metrics… And we found some!  In late 2016, internet marketing firm, iQuanti, mined data from the year’s Google searches to reveal the most searched resolutions:

  1. Get Healthy: 62,776,640 searches, a 13.77 percent increase over last year during the same time period
  2. Get Organized: 33,230,420 searches, dipping by 7.41 percent compared to last year’s tally of 35,888,700.
  3. Live Life to the Fullest: 18,970,210, spiking by 13.04 percent from last year, when it maxed at 16,782,030.
  4. Learn New Hobbies: 17,438,670 searches, up 4.72 percent from last year’s total searches of 16,652,950.
  5. Spend Less/Save More: 15,905,290 searches, up 17.47 percent from 13,539,500 in 2016.

At LMK we believe that people are the most important part of the TMF. So if the people behind a TMF are making New Year’s resolutions, they should be making TMF resolutions too!  Using the most popular resolutions above as inspiration, here’s some suggestions for starting your year off right:

  1. Get Healthy: LMK is all about TMF health. Although metrics are never a one-size-fits-all endeavor, start developing useful metrics by focusing on measurable aspects of the TMF, like Timeliness, Quality, and Completeness. Many of your electronic systems are already gathering the data you need to make measurable changes.
  2. Get Organized: If you’ve been reading our blog, you know the ‘golden rule’, ‘if it isn’t documented it didn’t happen’. Now is the time to take a fresh appraisal of your GDP (good document practice). Think, ALCOA: attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original, and accurate. Improving the quality of the individual documents in your TMF can go a long way towards preventing larger structural and procedural headaches
  3. Live Life to the Fullest: Although this resolution reads a bit cliché, the sentiment it carries is important. It calls on us to get up off the couch and live proactively. In the spirit of this resolution, we’d like to remind you that you can’t set a TMF on autopilot. If a process isn’t working, it’s time for a redesign! If it’s excessive or inefficient, why do it?
  4. Learn New Hobbies: Technology continues to increase its role in the TMF. AT LMK, we always focus on the people behind the TMF first, but those people need the right tools to do their best. The start of a new year is the perfect time to investigate new tools to modernize your TMF. With the right technology, your team can jump-start their TMF resolutions.
  5. Spend Less/Save More: Now is the time to consider how your TMF resources are being used. There’s always a limit to the amount of money and time that can be devoted to the TMF. Consider leveraging your TMF health metrics to adopt a risk-based approach for your TMF. By targeting your resources effectively you’ll have more time and money to reach the most important goals.

And yet the research isn’t encouraging. It’s estimated only 8% of us reach our resolution goals. But at LMK we’re cheering on your TMF resolutions. We can help you set specific, measurable, and observable goals. A few key incremental changes in 2018 could lead to TMF greatness in 2019. Now if we could only say no to the donuts in the conference room…