24/7 Software Blog

“Thank you all and be safe,” you tell your supervisors before they branch out to meet with their team.

You leave the meeting room.

You swing by your office next door to grab your radio.

You start the five-minute trek to the operations center upstairs.

“Welcome,” a passing staff member says to you, followed by a few others.

“We’re excited to have you,” Joe, the head of security tells you as he catches up.

Today is a day like any other for your property, except, for you.

It’s your first day on the job here.

Your experience in Proactive Operations landed you a higher-level job at this property.

You were hired to make improvements.

But, you’re not sure what to expect.

Calls begin coming in through the incident management system and radio.

You notice something unusual but wait a little longer to diagnose the issue.

More calls come in.

“Wow,” you say to yourself.

This property has many more incidents than your former property – but they use the same resources.

“We have a…,” you hear over the radio.

Everyone is moving around the channels attempting to get some clarity.

You listen to the radio but are struggling to collect needed information.

“That’s it,” you exclaim.

You look at your operations coordinator, Mike.

“This radio traffic is the problem,” you tell him.

“Radio is not adequate for calls we have on this property,” you say.

“We have too many incidents to communicate and manage,” you continue.

But, you know what to do.

“We’re getting mobile apps,” you assert.

“We need real-time communications, and we need it now!”

Is your incident management bogged down by the lack of proactive, real-time communications?

Then, it’s time to change your approach and reap the benefits of mobile incident management solutions.

“Tesla Motors started selling its stock to the public in 2010 — the first initial public offering of a U.S. automaker in more than a half-century. On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he's considering a reversal — taking the electric car company private,” writes Avie Schneider in their recent NPR article entitled “8 Years After Going Public, Elon Musk Wants To Take Tesla Private.”

“As he often does, the outspoken entrepreneur took to Twitter to deliver the news. ‘Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,’ Musk tweeted in early afternoon, according to the article.

Schneider explains, “Tesla stock was trading at about $355 a share before Musk's tweet. It jumped about 5 percent after the tweet. But later in the afternoon, trading in the stock was halted pending an official company announcement.”

“That came shortly before 3:30 p.m. when Tesla published an email that Musk sent to company employees, saying that no final decision on taking the company private had been made and that it would ultimately be left to shareholders,” states the NPR piece.

"The reason for doing this is all about creating the environment for Tesla to operate best. As a public company, we are subject to wild swings in our stock price that can be a major distraction for everyone working at Tesla, all of whom are shareholders," Schneider’s article reveals that Muck wrote.

And there it is.

The reason why Musk wants to take Tesla private.

It’s quite noble if you ask us.

But, there’s also a lesson here.

You’ve got to do right by your team and take charge to cultivate an environment that allows everyone to “operate best.”

Now, ask yourself: “Am I leading the initiative to create the environment for our team to operate best?”

Keep reading; today we’re going to share one proven methodology to help you create the environment you need that’ll benefit you, your staff and boss, and your most treasured assets – your customers.

Ready?

“I’ll be right behind you guys,” you shout to your operations team as they make their way out of the office.

It’s 1 AM, and you’re finishing up the final report on tonight’s event.

There’s only one last item on your to-do list.

You’ll review the incident reports from tonight, tally everything on your spreadsheet, record the information on your Monday morning report, and be on your way home.

You take the final swig of your water and begin reviewing the numbers from tonight.

“Here we go,” you whisper to yourself.

“Only one record of vomit,” you continue.

“That's pretty good,” you think to yourself.

“One fight,” you read aloud.

You continue reviewing the reports.

But, after three more minutes of review, you stop in your tracks.

“Wait a minute,” you shout.

Something is not right here.

All personnel and departments record incident types differently.

You begin listing the variations.

• “1 vomit.”
• “1 puke.”
• “2 throw up.”

The list goes on and on.

Your report for Monday will be inaccurate if you don’t fix this error.

You must fix it.

It’s now 1:12 AM.

You call Jack from security and tell him that you’re going to be a little longer.

It looks like another night that you won’t get to say goodnight to your husband and children.

But, you must ensure your numbers are accurate, and not only for Monday but all future analysis of your property’s incidents.

You need standardization.

And, you need it now.

“Pilots with billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company climbed to 170,800 feet — about 32.3 miles — and reached 2.47 times the speed of sound Thursday in the third successful rocket-powered flight of the company's newest spacecraft,” writes James Doubek in their recent NPR article entitled “Virgin Galactic Space Plane Reaches New Heights In Test Flight.”

“The company says the test flight was the first time the plane, named VSS Unity, reached a layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere, which lies about 31 to 53 miles above the Earth's surface,” explained Doubek.

According to Doubek’s article, “Virgin Galactic, which describes itself as the "world's first commercial spaceline" designed the VSS Unity to carry two pilots and six passengers into space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness.”

“The Unity works by first being carried by the larger VMS Eve aircraft. Both planes reached a height 46,500 feet Thursday before the Unity had a ‘clean release’ and the pilots ‘lit the spaceship's rocket motor, before pulling up into a near vertical climb and powering towards the black sky at 2.47 times the speed of sound,’ according to The Spaceship Co., a subsidiary of Virgin Galactic, writes Doubek.

The NPR piece shared, “After reaching its intended height, the company says the Unity glides down and lands without propulsion. It landed safely at a facility in Mojave, Calif., on Thursday.”

Talk about new heights, right?

Virgin Galactic blew the roof off innovation – and landed safely.

You can’t beat that, which is why we thought it was so critical to talk about in today’s article.

We want you to reach new heights.

And, this story boosts our motivation to do so even more.

“Forty of our volunteer staff for tomorrow’s event called out,” Samantha, your operations coordinator, tells you.

“We’ve got to get on the phones,” you respond anxiously. “We’ll be in a bad position if we’re short forty people tomorrow night.”

“I’m on it,” Samantha shouts. She rushes out of her cubicle and begins recruiting Brian, Ashley, and Kerry from guest services.

“I’ll see if we can get some of the security guys to help us too,” Brian tells the group. He walks out of the Administration office in a hurry.

15 minutes later, a few guys from the security team stroll in behind Brian to lend an extra hand.

“We need forty people,” you remind the group. “Let’s start calling,” you scream one more time before realizing something.

“Wait, who do we call,” you ask Samantha. She’s flush, and you already know what she’s going to say.

“Luke keeps the list of event staff in a folder that he always carries,” she stutters. “He always has it with him in case he needs to call for extra help or make arrangements with temp staff,” she continues.

Without delay, Samantha gasps as she puts what might be the final nail in your coffin. “Luke’s out sick.”

You have no choice. You call Luke and make the 90-minute trek to his house.

But, you have text communication!

So, why didn’t you use this system to communicate with employees from the beginning?

“The ideal Italian pizza, be it Neapolitan or Roman, has a crisp crust flecked with dark spots — marks left by a blazing hot oven. The dough is fluffy, moist and stretchy, and the toppings are piping hot. A pizzeria's brick oven pops these out to perfection, but intrepid home cooks attempting to re-create Italian-style pizzas have more than likely discovered facsimiles are nigh impossible to produce,” writes Angus Chen in their recent NPR article entitled “Pizza Physics: Why Brick Ovens Bake The Perfect Italian-Style Pie.”

"Even if you prepare [the pizza] the same way, you cannot get the same result with just your oven at home," says Andreas Glatz, a physicist at Northern Illinois University and pizza enthusiast, in Chen’s article.

According to the NPR piece, “The fact that you need a vaulted brick oven to bake a great Italian-style pizza is well-known, but Glatz and Andrey Varlamov, also a pizza-eater and physicist at the Institute of Superconductors, Oxides and Other Innovative Materials and Devices in Rome, wanted to know why. The secret behind a pizzeria's magic, they concluded in a paper published on arXiv.org last month, is in some unique thermal properties of the brick oven.”

“They started off interviewing pizzaiolos, or pizza makers, in Rome who were masters of the Roman style of pizza. For this, the bake lasts 2 minutes at 626 degrees Fahrenheit. (Neapolitan pizzas usually bake at an even higher temperature — at least 700 degrees.) That turns out a ‘well-baked but still moist dough and well-cooked toppings,” Glatz says in Chen’s article.

“The same settings in a conventional steel oven produce far less ideal results,” explains Chen.

"You burn the dough before the surface of the pizza even reaches boiling, so this is not a product you will want to eat," Glatz further explains in the NPR piece.

If you’re a pizza lover, today you’ve learned there is an optimal way to make it.

And that got us thinking about your operation.

We’re firm believers that there’s also an optimal way to run your operation.

That’s why we decided to the take learnings we gathered from Chen’s article to discuss why using a methodology will help create the best results for you.

Keep reading; we’re confident you’ll see the similarities between pizza physics and operations too.