Improve Process – Page 16 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

February 25, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 4

Now you have the story of your process written down, you can start to identify its components.

Read through the narrative, and pick out the names of things that get mentioned along the way. These will become ‘Props’, like the theatrical term for “an object used on stage or screen by actors during a performance.“

Props might be software e.g. “I enter the prospect’s details into the CRM System/Salesforce/Hubspot“; physical objects or their digital equivalents: “The prospect signs our non-disclosure agreement”, “I send an email to the client acknowledging receipt”. Props can also be implied: “I call the client” means there must be a telephone Prop of some kind.

One Prop in particular will stand out as being the thing that is being worked on by the process, the thing that is the point of the process. The star of the process, if you like. For example the key Prop in a process “File Annual Accounts”, is unsurprisingly, a thing called ‘Annual Accounts’.

This key Prop will help you identify the key Activities that make up the process, because it will be created, transformed and finalised through the process. Each transformation of the Prop called ‘Annual Accounts’ is a separate Activity, with an outcome that is either true or false. You have a set of Draft Accounts or you don’t, there is no halfway house. Any other Props you’ve identified will find a home inside one or more of these Activities, which may themselves be a process.

As an illustration, in order to “File Annual Accounts”, you generally have to create a set of draft accounts (an Activity you might name “Draft Annual Accounts”), check that they make sense (“Verify Draft Annual Accounts”), send them to the client for approval (“Request Draft Annual Accounts Approval”), deal with any changes (“Amend Draft Annual Accounts”), finalise them (“Finalise Annual Accounts”) and finally, send them to Companies House (“File Accounts”).

In this way, following the lifecycle of the key Prop will help you define Activities and the rough order in which they must happen.

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at finessing that order to take account of exceptions.

January 26, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 3

Now you know what your business process is aiming to achieve (Step 1), and you know where it really starts and ends (Step 2), you’re ready to describe it.

I’ve always found the best way to do this is to literally talk someone through it. Imagine that you are telling the story of this process to a listener, who is going to make notes. Ideally your listener would be another person, but if push comes to shove you can play both roles.

The conversation goes something like this:

As Storyteller, you start at the beginning, thinking of how it usually works. You simply tell the Listener the first thing that happens.
As Listener, you write that down, then ask: “What happens next?” , or “Then what happens?”
The Storyteller describes what happens next.
The Listener, notes it down, and asks again “What happens next?”
Repeat until the Storyteller answers “Nothing, that’s the end. We’ve got to the outcome.”

That’s it. For now. The next step is to work out the order things really need to happen in.

January 19, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 2

Step 2 of capturing a Business Process is to work out where it really starts.

A good rule of thumb is to think about where the ‘thing’ you’re dealing with – the ‘Noun’ in your process’s name – gets created, from the perspective of the business. These are good questions to ask:

If the thing is created outside the business, where does it first come into contact with it?
If the thing is created inside the business, where does that happen? Is that where it should happen?

You can ask similar questions to find where your process really ends:

If the thing passes through the business, when does it leave?
If the thing only exists inside the business, where does it get destroyed, or archived?

It’s helpful to think about the process from its real beginning to its real end, because that’s how many opportunities for improvement can be identified, without having to go to the trouble of documenting the entire thing first. It gives you a shortcut, if you like.

January 11, 2021

A virtuous flywheel

I love it when somebody else finds ways to say things better than I can. Here’s a great post from Corporate Rebels exploring how 2 very different companies found similar ways to turnaround and then grow:

3 Principles To Run A Company Sensibly

“both were motivated to adopt their unique methodologies to rescue the struggling companies they were leading. They wanted to save the jobs of people in their organizations. They thought this could be achieved by giving all an understanding of how the businesses were run—and then involve them in improving them. Their way of saving jobs became a new way to create jobs. These new jobs created new wealth. This wealth, was then shared with those who created it in the first place: all those in the company.”

In other words, they created a virtuous flywheel that didn’t depend on the bosses.

Sounds sensible to me. Flywheels get going faster when everyone pushes in the same direction.

December 15, 2020

Everything’s an offer

Yesterday I started reading ‘DO/IMPROVISE’ by Robert Poynton. It starts with another of those lovely diagrams that you only have to see to be changed by:

It’s the bit in the middle that’s powerful. ‘EAO’ stands for ‘Everything’s An Offer’.

An improv term, an ‘offer’ is what a fellow actor or audience member gives you to build on as you improvise a scene or story together. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how random it is, your job is to take it and use it to build your next offer, so that everyone can keep the scene going to a satisfactory conclusion for all. None of you know what that conclusion is until you find it.

The only part of the process you control is your own ability to spot offers, see their potential and react in a way that increases that potential for someone else.

After what 2020’s thrown at us, that might just be the attitude to cultivate for 2021.

December 8, 2020

Prompts

Every year my insurance broker calls me up to remind me that I need to renew. This is good. I … Read More “Prompts”

November 24, 2020

Tell me what’s happening

I’ve been ordering a lot online lately. Not primarily because of Covid, but because we’re kitting out the extension. I’ve had no problems at all, everyone has been well set up for online sales, and everything has worked exactly as I expected.

Until this last week.

Last Monday, I ordered some coir matting. Ordering was more or less straightforward (once I’d understood the pricing), and I received confirmation by email, setting my expectation for when I might hear more about how my order was progressing. So far, so good.

A few days later, I haven’t heard anything. I call the number in the email. It rings and rings. “It’s late, maybe they’ve left for the day. I’ll try again tomorrow.” The next day I call again. It rings and rings, until finally, the call is cut off. I try again. Again, no answer. “It’s Saturday, maybe lockdown has meant they can’t be there as usual. I’ll try again on Monday.”

On Monday, I call again. Again, no answer. Twice. Three times. I send an email. No reply – not even an automated response.

Now I’m beginning to mildly panic. “What if they aren’t a real business? Should I cancel the order? How will I get my money back? Should I be ringing my credit card company?”

I look them up on Companies House and Endole. All seems OK. “But what if they’ve gone bust? Or can’t fulfill orders because of lockdown?”

I try the head office number on the website. A young lady answers. “I’ll have to give you another number, we don’t handle online sales.” It is of course, the number I’ve been calling. I explain the situation – including my fears. She laughs, “Of course we’re real! But we’re not as big a company as we look online. We’ve been really busy and it’s been a struggle to keep up. I’ll get a message over to the warehouse and get them to call you.”

Sure enough, an email arrives shortly afterwards – “Your order’s on the lorry, and should be with you tomorrow. Let us know if it hasn’t arrived by Wednesday.”

And sure enough, it arrived this morning. Phew!

There are a couple of simple things even a small business can do to prevent this kind of misunderstanding, even if you’re taken by surprise by a surge in demand:

First, immediately, have a message on the warehouse phone that lets people know they have come through to the right place.

Include in your message that if there is no answer it’s because you’re busy. Genuinely busy. Explain why. If you can’t have more than 5 people in at a time, let people know. If you’re short-staffed, let people know, and let them know what you’re doing about it. People are very understanding if you are honest with them.

Second, as soon as you possibly can, make sure the phone gets answered by a real person.

Transfer the warehouse phone to the shop, or use a pay as you go phone answering service. Even if they can’t track the order, they can at least take a message, answer frequently asked questions, and reassure your clients that the business is real, and their money is in safe hands. Messages can be dealt with asynchronously, perhaps at the end of the day when the warehouse has more time.

These two simple, cheap and relatively easy actions will also reduce the number of incoming calls (e.g. my 7 calls would go down to 1), removing the incentive for harried warehouse people to ignore the phone.

The ultimate aim is of course, to make the communication of what’s happening with my order a side-effect of the fulfillment, but don’t wait until that’s in place – if you don’t tell me, your remote client, the real story, I’ll make up my own, and it might be wild.

Online, communicating what’s happening to an order is as important is actually fulfilling it.

October 30, 2020

To Do

What is a to do list, really?

Sometimes, they are steps in a process.

More often though, they are a cross section through a set of processes you are running in parallel.

That means that prioritising to dos is easier if you can see which processes will move forwards as a result.

Turning processes into to do lists has the opposite effect.

October 28, 2020

Maintenance

Maintenance. None of us want to do it. Most of us don’t even want to know it’s being done. We hide it. We put it off, and off, and off again, even though we know that ‘a stitch in time, saves nine’.

Why is that I wonder? Animals and birds seem to do maintenance instinctively. Birds pop food in one end of their nestlings, then tug poop out of the other. Nests and dens are rebuilt or cleared out regularly. How have we humans lost this?

Maintenance of all kinds is what keeps our systems and ecosystems going, but we don’t value it. We don’t even want to see that it’s being done. We hide it in basements and cupboards, offsite, even offshore. And we certainly don’t value the people who do it, we turn them into quasi-servants, invisible, ‘low-skill’, and therefore deserving only low wages.

Until something breaks. Then we love them, applaud them, can’t thank them enough. 5 minutes later, we’re ignoring them again.

Maintenance isn’t sexy, but it is essential. It’s high time we got better at it.

As a start, perhaps we should all do more of it ourselves?

I’m off to clean the oven.

October 21, 2020

This was last weekend’s reading.

Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Improve Process