Most businesses reach a point where everything feels messy, reactive and like you’re running through mud. If you’ve ever wondered why your business feels out of control, take comfort in the fact it’s not your fault - it’s actually natural that it’s ended up this way.
If a garden is left alone, its plants will move towards the sunlight, weeds will grow in available space and pests will take over. Left long enough, everything becomes tangled, chaotic and difficult to undo.
This is a good metaphor for how a business operates. When left to grow organically, team members will find their own way of “finding the sunlight” by taking the easiest path to completing a task. This works fine in small teams, where the variations in how people work don’t tend to affect one another.
But what happens when you scale this team up?
All of a sudden you’ve got many permutations of how work is being done and no one understands what their neighbour is doing. That means that work is lost when its passed from one person to another, bad practices creep in and those pests arrive in the form of errors and mistakes.
The quality of your services, products and customer relationships suffer as a result. Issues crop up, work takes longer to get done and suddenly you find yourself being reactive instead of acting proactively and moving your business forward.
It’s a vicious cycle. You need time to sit down and do the work that will allow you to stop firefighting, but you don’t have the time to do it.
And just like an overgrown garden, the longer you leave it, the harder it is to fix.
It won’t. Let me explain.
Business operations is really a catch-all term for the combination of people, process and technology that come together to achieve a business goal.
Software is one part of this equation and is the one people usually jump to first. In reality, its rare that the correct solution is chosen because you don’t really know how its supposed to help you. That means you often end up constrained by the system, not empowered by it.
Leaping straight to hiring often yields the same outcome. How do you teach someone to do a job that isn’t clearly defined?
And as we’ve seen, adding another plant to the garden can make the problem worse.
A process is a set of activities completed in sequence to achieve a goal. It’s how projects are delivered, invoices are processed and products are shipped. Because its the list of actionable steps you need to take to achieve your goal, by definition it should be the first thing you focus on.
Once you understand what you should be doing and when, then you can focus on who and how. This is where you look at people and technology.
The key to streamlining business operations is to focus on process first.
So at this point you’ll be wondering what a process-first approach looks like and how it can help you become proactive instead of reactive.
It involves being intentional about how you go about your day-to-day work. It’s about taking a step back, asking yourself what’s working, where there are bottlenecks and how you can improve.
Reviewing and improving processes in this way will allow you to:
There’s some up-front investment required to achieve these outcomes, but it’s short-term pain for long-term gain. A garden is only as beautiful as the effort put into it.
This is exactly what business process improvement is designed to solve: identifying where your operations are breaking down and putting structure in place so your business runs efficiently.