An Incredibly Powerful, and Wildly Misunderstood Tool for Improvement

For many the word "process" brings stress, or at least a solid eye roll. Frankly I feel similarly, but for different reasons than most. Unfortunately this connotation that many people have leads to many processes not getting the love and care they need to work well for your company. So if you want to improve your business, it's likely the first place to look - bear with me, you can do this ;)

As a side note, I love helping people with their processes - digging through and understanding the pieces and links, working with roles across the company to get a systemic feel for effective and problematic parts of the workflow, and helping find the best ways to resolve those issues. If process or related parts of running a business don't give you warm fuzzies, check out the rest of my business blogs as I release them and see if it helps, or give me a call :)

So you've decided to take a good solid look and apply some resources to making your work flow at your company all it can be. Great! Where do you start?

Remember that process is many things - not just a checklist document. The first step to solving any problem or improving any situation is truly understanding current state. You have to follow your "work" in your company from the very start (usually a product or service idea or request) to the very end (sometimes receipt of payment, but often through the customer's experience with the product). Determine the depth of review needed - like most things, the more effort you spend understanding it, the easier and more effective improvements will be - but any work on it will still be helpful.

As you learn how things are actually happening (e.g. is someone just passing customer requests over the lunch table to their buddies in IT or dev?), issues - and resolution ideas - often become obvious (now we know why some customer requests were lost - with no consideration of priority). Some sort of visual documentation can be a great way to keep track of how things connect.

Once you have information on how things are operating, along with issues or slow downs, start looking at solutions. Be careful not to jump at the first idea - this is where process monsters come from, or short sighted damaging "solutions". Take a moment if you can to question causes and effects of the issues, as well as brainstorm a few other options for solutions and cost/benefit/effects of each. Also, when it comes to making these decisions around changing your process, there's considering current needs but also future planning. Creating process change that will support what your company is, but also what it will be is powerful but is a whole separate beast.

Sound like a pain? Or something you don't have time for? This is why consultants like me can be a great resource. We also have a bit of a superpower in that we aren't already neck deep in your business so we can see things differently and apply more varied solutions. I'd love to help - whether it's a 1 hour call to get ideas and help you find your starting point, or several days working with your team to guide the entire improvement project. Contact me, let's see what solution is best for you.