Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Process Design

Seeing it through
January 24, 2019

Seeing it through

Seeing a case or project through from beginning to end is very satisfying – both for the person doing it, and for the client on the other side.

But how do you achieve that when you need to be flexible in how you assign resources?

By having a clear, high-level process for handling cases, then making sure everyone knows how to run it, and that all the information needed to move that case forward is accessible to anyone who needs it at any time.

Most of the time, one person can handle the whole thing. But when that isn’t possible (due to holidays or illness, or scheduling constraints), the client needn’t feel the difference.

And you’ve just created a more empowering division of labour.

Top-down, bottom-up
January 23, 2019

Top-down, bottom-up

I get the feeling that top-down thinking is very unfashionable at the moment. It smacks too much of command-and-control, over-complicated buraeucracy, and having things ‘done to you’ instead of ‘done with you’ – or even ‘done by you’.

Bottom-up thinking is great for quick wins, incremental change and emergent consensus, but top-down can uncover opportunities for radical change that bottom-up thinking will miss, because you’re asking higher-level questions – “How should we keep our promise?”, rather than “How do we open the office?”.

And often, by answering these high-level questions, we can remove whole chunks of low-level procedure that would otherwise go unquestioned.

We shouldn’t let our thinking get trapped in our organisational structure.

Serialisation
January 21, 2019

Serialisation

Years ago, I worked with a client who wanted to streamline and automate how clients were onboarded and offboarded (if that is a word). They didn’t have much time to spend with me, so they gave me a copy of the checklist they used so I could get a handle on how it worked.

This checklist would get created whenever a new client signed up, and would travel around the client’s office from one person to the next, with each person doing, then ticking off the task they were responsible for.

If you have something like this (and it might be an electronic ‘checklist’), here’s a useful question to ask yourself:

“Does the next person really need to wait for me to complete my task before they can start theirs?”

If not, they probably shouldn’t be on the same checklist.

Professionals
January 15, 2019

Professionals

“A critical characteristic of a profession is the need to cultivate and exercise professional discretion – that is, the ability to make case by case judgements that cannot be determined by an absolute rule or instruction” [*]

So, how do you get professionals to do things the right way?

Not by expecting them to work like fast-food operatives, or a production line.

First, work with them to build a shared vision of what ‘the right way’ means for your clients – what I call your Promise of Value.

Then create a supporting framework of high-level, end to end business processes that operates at the right level of abstraction – delivering guidance rather than absolute rule. Something like a professional musician’s score, that tells them what to play, but not how.

The two things together make a powerful combination that encourages consistency, yet leaves plenty of room for judgement on the exceptions, plus plenty of scope to evolve the system in the light of experience.

In other words, you’ll free your people up to be professional.

Consistency
January 10, 2019

Consistency

Whatever you’re promising your prospects, it isn’t just about the technicals of what you do, it’s also about how you do it, and that needs to be carried through into every experience

Queues

Queues

Despite my frequent rants about self-checkouts, there is one good reason to have them.

If you only have one or two things, you don’t want to wait behind an enormous weekly shop. A self-checkout or basket-only lane is a good solution here.

Similarly, its a good idea to split the bakery queue into ‘sandwiches’ and ‘bread’, so bread buyers aren’t waiting behind the office lunch order.

Sorting a big queue into separate, differently handled sub-queues reduces queueing overall, and makes handling the different types of order easier, because you’re not switching between them all the time.

Better for everyone then.

Forcing everyone into the self-checkout queue defeats the object though.

Stressors are information
January 8, 2019

Stressors are information

As Nassim Taleb says in his excellent book ‘Antifragile’, ‘stressors are information’.

That means that rather than just get stressed by them, you can use them to direct improvement.

For example, when ‘exceptions’ start to become common, it’s a sign that something in your system needs to change in line with the environment.

A good place to start is by asking “How could I pre-empt this situation?”.

Optimalism
January 6, 2019

Optimalism

It sometimes seems to me that the world is divided into two ways of dealing with uncertainty.

You can expect the worst, and try to protect yourself from that possibility by tightly specifying and controlling everything down to the last detail.

Or you can expect the best, and leave everything to chance.

Neither response is optimal. The first closes off opportunities to do better than expected. The second leads to drift.

A more constructive approach is to set direction, leaving latitude for serendipity, obliquity and creativity, measuring effects as you go.

That way, whatever your natural bias, the worst that happens is that things get better.

Automating computers
January 2, 2019

Automating computers

This fact is not as well-known as I think it should be:

The world’s first business computer was developed for J Lyons & Co. Ltd., to streamline and automate the analysis of the masses of data they collected every day, through which they could accurately predict demand in their chain of tea shops.

What is even less well known, is that the machine, installed in 1951, was the culmination of 20 years of business design by John Simmons and his team.

In other words, they didn’t just throw new technology at the business. They worked out what was the best way to do things, put those processes in place, tested and tweaked them and only then used LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) to automate parts of them.

It’s an approach worth reviving.

PS. If you’d like to find out more – “A computer called LEO” is a good read.

PPS. The ‘computers’ were the chains of female clerks who cumulatively added up the daily numbers received from tea shops. One of Simmons’ ambitions was to release people from this kind of mental drudgery.