It's another paradox that management and planning require both chaos and order, and your job is to understand when one versus the other is the right course.

—Linda Hill

Once a company's ideal organizational structure has been identified, the next step is creating the firm's processes, which, along with its information systems, define how work is executed in a company.

Processes that have been successfully set up and programmed into software ensure that everything runs smoothly and on time. Companies that have created significant business processes are better suited to deal with complexity.[i] They spend less time fixing problems that they could have prevented. And there is more time to respond to real-time challenges, projects, and new ideas.

The Heptagram model proposes the implementation of processes as the second pillar of business design. Along with the foundational structure, you need to think about how operations and workflows will navigate that structure’s channels to deliver products and achieve results.

Processes in a New Company

Processes are one of the most fundamental tools needed to organize a company. By setting up actions that occur consistently to achieve the company's objectives, your business will produce the results you want. Having set workflows leads to consistency, but it is also a platform that will ensure the best results as you grow.

If you are starting a business, you will quickly discover that its operations are much more complicated than anything that can reside in any one person's mind. As your company grows, you will also realize that you cannot do all the work yourself, and at that point, you might hire someone to whom you can delegate part of the work. As the work increases, you will employ more people, and soon these people need to be organized and synchronized.

Not every company has set workflows. In some organizations, someone trains employees, and they perform their duties according to the parameters and the feedback they receive. When employees begin working in a company with no procedures, they develop their methods for getting the work done on time, which is not necessarily good or bad. However, if an employee is not trained comprehensively, there will be gaps in understanding, resulting in mistakes.

If you have not mapped procedures, it is unclear if the required steps have been executed consistently. Mistakes begin to occur. You may first notice that something important does not get done. For instance, a proposal that needed to be delivered to a client was not sent. When these types of things occur, you might spend more time putting out unnecessary fires than operating efficiently and thinking strategically.

The procedures you design will provide more organization, efficiency, and accountability for the work that your company needs to accomplish every day. At first, they address where you are at the moment. Yet, as the company becomes more and more complex, they become even more critical because procedures determine how work is executed through the company across functions.

Before the company can adequately respond to a complex and changing world, it must regularly execute basic operations with expected results.

Defining Processes

A process is a set of tasks within a company that, together, accomplish a goal. It is a chain of events that leads a project from start to finish.

Processes can be strategic, operational, or administrative, and they follow a hierarchy. For each process, you may have a sub-process.[ii] Therefore, each procedure is composed of actions that can be laid out on your to-do list so that you and your team can easily accomplish them as part of your daily work. These tasks can have due dates and will include detailed descriptions.

Processes include activities that you can assign to individual employees, across locations, and using various systems. They can cross departments, functions, and even companies, and they evolve with the company and are interconnected. Processes are how organizations coordinate the work of several departments, and they can be challenging to manage.[iii]

Business processes are predictable and recurrent. They take place frequently, and the team working on them understands and is responsible for them. With time, they can become more automated and sophisticated.[iv]

Most firms have a payroll process. Each month someone is responsible for making deposits or writing checks. This person likely has a reminder pop up on his calendar to not forget to make the payments.

Instead of relying on memory or calendar notifications, you can set up payroll as a process.First, create a diagram of how you are currently handling payroll and lay out the tasks that make up the workflow. The payroll process can be scheduled for the date on which you pay, say the 25th of the month, with the title "Payroll," indicating the tasks necessary to pay employees. The first task or step refers to a spreadsheet with each employee's payments and deductions. The person who manages payroll verifies the amounts he will pay against the spreadsheet for the current month and then writes the checks.

The process would show up automatically each month on the person's to-do list as follows:

Payroll

·      Refer to Payroll spreadsheet for amounts to be paid

·     Write checks

·     Obtain signature

·     Distribute checks

This reminder unburdens him from having to remember to pay everyone on time, and you will have generated a process that can grow with the firm.

To start paying employees via direct deposit, you modify the process to include that detail. You may also have someone who reviews payroll and monthly bonuses. The new steps now look like this:

Payroll

·      Refer to Payroll spreadsheet for amounts to be paid

·      Verify that the direct deposit amount is correct

·      Calculate monthly bonus

·     Notify manager for approval

This process now has built within it a level of review, and not only will payroll go out on time, but the manager will also review it to ensure it is correct.

In this simple version, the entire payroll process and its tasks are laid out with a single due date. This workflow describes the type of payroll process that a startup with only a few employees would have. As the company grows and becomes more intricate, you will probably have to break up these procedures to accommodate more tasks with different due dates and assignations.

I did not realize just how much work a company does every day until I started cataloging everything we do. Even if your company already has set workflows, it is a worthwhile investment to compile and analyze them, making any necessary changes. Processes are recurrent, so if one activity is inefficient, its effect is multiplicative, and the waste of time is replicated every time someone executes it.

Once you have mapped an organization's business processes and designed them to work together, the company will operate like a beautiful symphony. You will spend less time wondering about possible missing pieces and more time foreseeing future problems and thinking about strategy and innovating.

Benefits of Process Implementation

Companies always benefit when their business operations are streamlined. Implementing processes will cause your business to improve in many ways.

Greater Efficiency

One of the significant timewasters each day is being interrupted and forced to take care of unrelated tasks. Processes can help streamline those interruptions and organize aggregated tasks into groups. When an entire transaction is clustered, no time is wasted going from one activity to the next. Processes establish set times for accomplishing each task.

When I managed the sales team at Alianza, I was often asked how much space we had left or how many units we had sold. Sometimes, I could not answer because I did not have a set process for reviewing reports. When I began studying our key information, I realized I did not have the best reports available, which I later created.

I also had not organized my schedule. I would go over the reports at random times. When I was asked again about space and units sold, I found that my information was not up to date. Not having this information was embarrassing, and I had to find a solution.

To stay up to date, I needed to review the information every two to three days, and once I started using the reports consistently, I was able to reduce the reviews to once a week. I created a process whereby I aggregated everything related to sales. I was only doing it on certain days instead of reviewing the information when the thought crossed my mind.

The benefit of doing this type of review was, first, that it streamlined my effort into one sitting, saving time, and second, it ensured that I was reviewing the documents as often as necessary.

Better Organization

Processes also trigger the development of routines and positive habits. These practices help each person organize their time more.

When a behavior becomes automatic, it becomes a habit—our brain stores habits in our basal ganglia, one of the primitive parts of the brain. Once the brain saves a pattern, we no longer have to think in such a detailed way about doing this behavior. It acts similarly to breathing and is involuntary. Our mind is then free to stop thinking about how we walk or perform a monthly cash reconciliation. The habit liberates mental space to reflect on company strategy or new products.[v]

Routines provide a structured guideline for how we spend our days. Once a person develops routines organized around corresponding workflows, her schedule becomes more predictable.

Suppose that on Thursday mornings, Tom writes checks and organizes the payments that need to go out in the next week. If somebody tries to schedule a meeting with him on a Thursday morning, Tom knows that will not work because that is when he makes payments, and Tom's process guarantees that he will complete all payments on time. Tom's week is set up in a pattern so he can schedule the meeting for another time when he is available.

A trickle-down effect of Tom's process for payments will occur, and other people will start organizing themselves accordingly. If, for instance, payments go out only on Tuesdays, suppliers will stop calling to find out when checks are ready, and they will start to show up on Tuesdays. External vendors and suppliers will shape their routines around your team. This type of behavior can save time and money.

The processes' design will ideally consider the entire company and include all the main operational tasks to fit carefully together like a completed puzzle. Set workflows have the most impact when, through them, you can coordinate work across functions. When the team works within designed and scheduled processes, operations will run smoothly with a lower likelihood of missing actions or mistakes.

These gaps tend to occur when one person thinks somebody else is responsible for a critical deliverable. As soon as we spot these issues, we quickly assign the tasks to a team and document them in procedures. When everybody is clear about everybody else's responsibilities, no work will be lost.

At Celaque, we construct buildings that we sell or lease and then later manage. In the initial phases of construction, we negotiate the prices for all the building materials we will use. We then buy the supplies we need. The purchasing function crosses over a few departments: buildings require significant capital expenditures, and more than one team is involved. Procedures are vital for keeping everyone coordinated.

Three teams work together to negotiate the prices for the supplies we use, ensuring that we purchase the items at the agreed-upon price, receive the right number of articles, have adequately accounted for our inventory, and have accurately recorded all purchasing transactions. We have developed processes that tie all these actions together. These procedures ensure accuracy and synchronize each of the team's daily activities.

Everything that is recurrent is laid out and documented so that once each team member has received thorough training, they can practically run them themselves.

Ownership

Having set responsibilities is especially helpful when a new person joins the team. When we implemented processes, we reduced our onboarding time; the training period is now shorter than in the past, and the new person takes ownership of her responsibilities sooner.

We have also assigned processes by role. If one person moves into another position and someone else takes over from the original person, we simply select all the role's procedures and reassign them.

When each team member no longer spends valuable time wondering if everything is getting done or worrying about solving preventable problems, she will have time to think about and take ownership of her entire job. Organizing tasks also leaves more room for improvement because team members can find ways to innovate on their workflow and the results they achieve.

At Celaque, each person owns his work and is on the lookout for improvements that can be made. To support our teams, we created a process modification request form they can use when they need to modify or update processes.

The person requesting the modification assigns the form automatically to our processes team, which responds as promptly as possible to make our process modification workflow seamless.

More Accuracy

One of the most important benefits of implementing processes is reducing costly and painful mistakes that can trigger a cascade of adverse effects.

The description of each process will ideally explain everything that needs to be done for that specific task. If each critical step is documented, there will be fewer oversights. Errors are often costly—whether you must pay fines or repeat work to fix a mistake. They can also take a toll on morale.

Imagine a company that has not adequately implemented set business workflows. Now imagine it is busy with a significant system implementation, and its accounting team did not start the company's fiscal process on time.

The team eventually prepares the documentation, but there is not enough time to properly analyze and review its tax filing. An extra week would have been enough to find the best tax strategy for the firm. With no time left, and to avoid late fees, the accounting team decides to submit the information as it is.

Without a reminder to start preparing tax documentation on time, mistakes can occur. The quick process probably caused losses because the team did not have time to discover the laws' best application to ensure an optimum tax rate for the company.

It is easier to handle your procedures digitally because they can be programmed into the future, and you can track how your company is operating. The software can generate a recurrent notification when an action related to a process needs to start.

At Celaque, we use project management software to save all our procedures. The software will also record the details of routine, daily work. We found that it has been worth the investment of documenting everything and uploading it into a platform that will organize our work. As the firm faces new requirements, its processes can be updated to ensure they work better all the time.

Effective Time Management

Processes can help you automate your company's work. Automation allows the organization to eliminate steps and execute operations faster.

Once processes are laid out, executed at predictable intervals, and when they are repeated numerous times, they become automatic because they are recurrent and not haphazard.

When you design processes by analyzing the company's overarching operations, you can also cut out duplicate tasks and redundancies that naturally occur when growth is organic. As I implemented set workflows at our firm, I found different timewasters, such as two people executing the same task or tasks that took longer than necessary because they included unnecessary steps.

Inefficient ways of operating are natural, especially when a company is growing. The priority is to get the work done, and sometimes the way the company performs is not optimal. Process implementation can streamline these workflows for efficiency.

Better Results

 Processes can help you deliver your products consistently and on time. Dependable procedures result in customers who will come back because they know they can count on the same results from you.

This consistency can extend to financial statements and welcome kits for your clients. Whatever you deliver as a company can go out on time and consistently. Not only will your clients be pleased, but so will your suppliers and investors.

The processes for a large company will be complicated. They will include different departments and assignees and may span a day or a few months. They will require more details and training. But the basic concept is simple—creating a set of steps that need to be taken regularly to ensure quality.

Data and Tracking

Once you have added business procedures to a process management platform, it will provide data and track the different activities and show how often your team performs them. Your system will help you analyze how well the procedures are working.

As you are sifting through the data, you may find errors in how you configured the company's workflows. You may also notice that a person or team is overloaded and consistently behind. The reports may point to a need to hire another person on that team.

You may also notice other ways your company's processes can be improved. During one of our procedure revisions, we saw that they were not formatted well. This review prompted us to improve how we were formatting and organizing the procedures. We examined all our processes, revised the content, and standardized the formatting to make it consistent across departments.

Our guidelines for processes included not only how we presented the content but how the procedures were categorized. We also reviewed how we managed the dates so that the timing between different team members was staggered and a person's schedule did not become overbooked on any given day or week.

Additionally, we clearly labeled where each of the tasks fit in the larger scheme. For example, we identified them by team and showed what action came before it and what job came after, helping our teams to collaborate better.

Cultural Shift

With the help of designed business processes, your team will start working together for the same goal and towards achieving the same results.

When goals are shared, tasks are more visible, execution is more effortless, and individual responsibilities are more explicit. Over time, processes become part of your company's culture because everybody sees how essential they are. People collaborate more smoothly, and everything gets done on time.

Implementing Processes in Your Company

Processes will help you grow your business. Setting up workflows for an entire company takes a significant investment of time and effort. To get started, study the daily tasks you and the rest of the company perform, and then start implementing your procedures. I recommend beginning with the most critical areas, where an error can have significant consequences. You can work through each department until you document and configure every significant procedure.

Ideally, you will develop a plan to design and implement your company’s processes fully. However, if that is not possible, any improvement will be noticeable. Implementing set procedures or redesigning the workflows for your firm's most vital areas will make an enormous difference in time management and productivity.

We have divided our types of processes into those that occur recurrently and those that follow a sequence. Recurrent processes are those that are repeated the same way, every certain amount of time.

These processes can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and so on. Examples include calculating yearly bonuses and weekly approval of outgoing checks. They are anything that is done again and again, at fixed intervals.

Sequential processes describe a set of steps that someone takes every time a specific event occurs. A sequential process is a checklist. Hiring a new person follows a sequential process with critical steps that follow a set order. To start the process, you post the available position and receive resumes. You may send out a questionnaire, and you then perform telephone interviews. Next, you do an in-person interview, and finally, select a candidate and negotiate the offer.

The tasks are logical and easy to remember, and each primary step has detailed sub-steps. Without a checklist, it is easy to forget something. In the previous example, it is useful to include the list of places where you advertise the new position. If this subtask is not present, you will need to think back to remember the resources you previously used each time you want to hire someone. What you create is a live checklist that is continuously updated.

As a real estate development company, we are always selling properties, and each time we sell a unit, several actions must take place to complete the transaction.

Before we had documented our procedures, whenever someone overlooked a crucial action, it was left undone until we discovered the mistake.

We were handling about ten to twenty sales transactions a month, and the risk of error was too grave; we needed to organize our process. We decided to create a comprehensive listing to ensure that all steps were covered. We then shared our deal-closing list on our project management software and collaborated on the same steps for every single closing.

Compiling all the actions in the closing process was an achievement. The more steps we wrote down, the more we realized we were missing. As we collected all the information, we recognized that we did not have a proper procedure for closing a sale before this exercise.

We chronicled all the steps, along with dates in which they had to be completed and by whom. Here is a summarized excerpt of the list:

·     Create and review the contract

·     Print out an invoice

·     Obtain signatures and deposit, hand out the invoice

·     Give deposit to our accounting team

·     File contract

·     Close sale on the system

·     Make sure to update the system database with final closing details

We tried to make our list as succinct as possible. If there are too many steps, they are less likely to be followed. Additionally, one person does not perform all the steps: Sales is in charge of updating the system, whereas our accounting team has to take care of the funds and the transactions. The salesperson activates the checklist and assigns the tasks to the different departments once we have closed a sale.

Even today, the list is a work in progress. Every time we discover an error, we ask: What can we do to make sure this does not happen again? Every quarter, on average, we add a new step or adjust an existing one. Changes in regulations have also prompted modifications to our checklist.

To store and maintain our checklist, we use project management software. The software allows us to create templates that we can duplicate each time they are needed. We have carefully designed each model and stored it with a description, dates, and assignees. When we anticipate a new closing, the salesperson activates the templates, and everyone immediately receives their assigned tasks.

Sales are time-sensitive, and closing a transaction must be done quickly and accurately. Everybody knows the timeliness involved in closing sales, and the minute anybody receives a sales-related task, that activity becomes that person’s immediate priority.

The templates are adaptable. If a sale takes longer than anticipated due to the client leaving on a trip and delaying the contract signage, for example, they can quickly shift the due dates. The descriptions can also be modified if there is a special request by the client: they can add comments, and if necessary, several people can collaborate on a single task. Once they have completed the work, the checklists are archived for future reference.

We have been using our checklist system for a few years now. The beauty of the templates is that we do not worry anymore about forgetting an important task. We have documented every step, so everything we need to do gets accomplished. All significant documentation is complete and adequately stored.

Please go to www.pamelaayuso.com/heptagram-bonus and download our monthly accounting close process to see more details of another of our main procedures.

Process Implementation Best Practices

Process implementation will vary from company to company. What follows are some of the “best practices” I have found as we have implemented our processes in Celaque.

1. Diagram Your Workflows

I recommend diagramming as a great way to visualize your process automation. A diagram is a visual representation of how work gets accomplished in your company. You use different symbols to show operations and information flows. You would start by listing each of your business’s significant functions: accounting, logistics, sales, marketing, and research and development, among others.

Then you can select one, divide it into subcategories, and diagram how each process currently operates. Accounting, for example, can be divided into subcategories, including expense and income management or financial reporting and auditing. Include in the diagram details such as who is responsible for each task and what other departments it goes through for approval.

The goal is to find hidden inefficiencies and timewasters and question if there is a better way for work to flow. You might be surprised by how obvious specific problems are once you lay them out visually. You might spot redundancies or work that was not executed, or the operation might be too convoluted. You may find workflows that can occur more efficiently and with less wasted time. For instance:

Inefficient Processes

·     One person may be taking the same action as someone else without the other person’s knowledge, and as a result, they duplicate the work.

·     One person may be repeating a task every day of the week, even though that is unnecessary. Instead, she can execute it as needed, but no earlier, reducing wasted time.

Potential Errors

·     Lack of supervision in essential areas: Critical reports and processes, such as financial statements, are best reviewed by more than one person to ensure accuracy.

·     Lack of reconciliation can occur between systems and reports, especially with legacy systems or when using spreadsheets. Ideally, to avoid reconciling information, all reports should be generated from one central database of company information. At times, the company’s budget may not allow for a system with that capability, and you will need to reconcile relevant documents. For example, you may need a process for checking inventory availability against sold items so that quantities and descriptions match.

·     Tasks that someone needs to perform that do not show up on anybody’s to-do list: When creating a diagram of how work is flowing in your company, you may find that some functions are not being done or are not being performed often enough. This problem will have to be addressed by assigning the activity to a team member and specifying how often the team needs to do it.

Heavy Workloads

·     Some people’s jobs are full of essential tasks, while others on the team have lighter responsibilities: Diagramming your current workflows can help you detect where workloads are uneven and correct that accordingly.

Lengthy Processes

·     Too much bureaucracy can slow down the company and affect its bottom line. A diagram will indicate where bottlenecks are so they can be trimmed down or redesigned.

·     Your company procedures may take longer than necessary. This delay may occur because of a lack of communication or no connection to the result. The person may not know the importance of that specific deliverable.

·     Deliverables go out on a specific day because they always have, even if a different time would be more efficient. Analyzing your current processes will show the team what timing will make your work effective.

As you diagram, look for and analyze ways that you can streamline your current workflow. The processes team can work with the person responsible for the task to evaluate and improve it together. Some questions you can ask are the following. You can print this list at www.pamelaayuso.com/heptagram-bonus:

·     Is there a better way to perform this process?

·     Does the current structure contain risks, and what mistakes could occur?

·     What is the worst-case scenario given the present configuration?

·     What could I add at the end to ensure that we have reconciled everything and we have minimized mistakes?

·     What steps can I eliminate to simplify the process as much as possible?

·     How can the team choreograph their processes like a dance?

·     How can tasks be distributed among the team so everyone’s workload is balanced?

These are good questions to ask for any area of your company. After completing the first few, you may want to go back and improve your original diagrams because the goal is to understand the tasks involved as well as possible.

2. Design Your Company Processes

The next step is to create a diagram of how each task should work. The workflows you design should be as simple and fluid as possible. The OHIO principle, which stands for “Only Handle It Once,” is beneficial to ensure items are only worked on completely at set intervals and not in bits and pieces.

The idea is to group related tasks, schedule a recurrent time, and work on them only at that allotted time. Instead of jumping from one job to the next, you can do everything related to one area in one sitting and only work on the task at hand at that point and continue at it until it is complete. The OHIO principle will greatly increase your company’s efficiency.

If you apply the OHIO principle to your company’s weekly accounting review, you will view all the reports at the same time every week. Instead of cycling through different statements at different times throughout the week, you can make a list of all the critical metrics/reports, such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, and cash flow, and review them in one sitting.

Classify and Organize Your Processes

Once your diagram shows a broad sketch of the processes in their ideal configuration, you are now ready to identify and classify them. List them all and see how they tie together. Group them by areas.

At Celaque, we have grouped all of our processes by categories. This type of organization makes processes easier to find and manage. We have identified administrative work as one of the primary areas in our Sales department. Here we include everything related to paperwork, such as digitally sent proposals and signed contracts and updating any reports. All this work is grouped in one process and performed at one time only to save time.

Before implementing them, try laying out the procedures you have listed to see how they fit with one another. We usually map out all tasks on a calendar to verify that workloads are consistent. We compare to make sure the due dates of the process are orchestrated between team members, as in the case of one person depending on the other to complete a procedure.

Assign Complete Responsibilities

Sometimes a process becomes fragmented when one person takes care of one piece of the project while the next person takes care of another step. A way around this is to designate one person to complete the entire process and another to review it. A bonus is that responsibilities are then entirely clear, and you have added a level of review.

Seeing the whole process from beginning to end can be motivating to your team. According to a Harvard Business Review paper by Ayelet Fishbach, when people start working for a goal, they usually begin enthusiastically, and then towards the middle, they lose that drive. If the person cannot see the result, the loss of energy in the middle of a project may be accentuated. Fishbach quotes one study where observant Jews were to light candles on eight successive days, beginning the first night with one and adding another each night. The participants were more likely to light the candle on the first and final nights but not on the other six nights in between.[vi]

Seeing the impact of a process is more motivating than merely being a cog in the company's wheels. Employees are inspired when they connect their actions to the final impact—for example, by meeting customers who benefit from their work. [vii] This experience will transform their work from an abstract concept into a specific appreciation of how they contribute to other people’s lives.[viii]

When an employee is entirely responsible for a process, he will know he has to answer for the results and must make the right decisions to guarantee those outcomes. Exercising judgment on the job can increase a feeling of competence and effectiveness. This autonomy at work includes structuring and organizing one’s tasks, impacting decisions, and utilizing one’s skills to best suit the organization.[ix]

When designing processes, the challenge lies in balancing the company's best overall workflow while also leaving space for independent decision-making and autonomy. One crucial step is ensuring that the group views processes as their tool for maintaining work quality and timing. Departments will ideally have the freedom to modify procedures as they adapt them to how the group operates.

Design Them to Be Durable and Flexible

Companies and people are constantly evolving, and procedures must do so as well. If you do not design the processes to be resilient, they will be too rigid and either become a burden or eventually collapse.

To make processes perpetually relevant, they need to be able to evolve. They need to be emergent to adapt to the changes that occur around them while also being robust to maintain their purpose. The trick is balancing flexibility and durability. Here are some strategies we have used at Celaque:

First, each person oversees her processes. When someone enters our company, one of the essential parts of training is how procedures work and that they belong to each team and individual. As a person starts to rely more on them, processes become tools that support them in performing the role, rather than an imposition. By taking ownership, each person will adapt them as becomes necessary.

We also make sure they can be quickly reassigned or moved. The software you use will ideally allow quick changes to the assignee, dates, and descriptions. If a person is away on vacation or leave, he can easily reassign the processes to another person or move them to a different date.

Finally, the less bureaucracy there is for workflow changes, the better. Processes are the programming for how a company operates, so they should be altered carefully.

Your processes should be as long as they need to be but no longer than that. As Atul Gawande explains in his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, not all checklists are made equal. Boeing’s flight operations group issues more than one hundred lists a year.

Dan Boorman, a veteran pilot at Boeing, says there are useful checklists and bad ones. “Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical… [They] try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turning them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”[x]

Not every action a company takes will be part of a process. There must be plenty of room to work with the unpredictable because we work in complex environments, and you cannot script a great deal of what happens at work.

Processes should balance checklists with space for independent thought and collaboration. The lists ensure that you accomplish all the necessary steps to achieve the company’s primary objectives and omit nothing, freeing up space for creativity and entrepreneurship.

Create Time Savers

As you are designing workflows, make sure they are as efficient as possible. To save time, find ways to cut out steps from your teams' workflows. For instance, instead of downloading information from a platform, have it sent via email, for example, to be available when needed.

Automating your office’s procedures brings numerous benefits. These sometimes small, time-saving ideas will add up over time and make your workflow smoother. Every bit of energy and time you save allows space for growth and improved development.

Creating templates and lists for documents that you and your team regularly utilize are great ways to streamline work. Some examples of models are:

·     By creating a client proposal template with the information that goes in all proposals, you only have to customize it whenever you or your team must send a document to a client.

·     If you send every new client a welcome message, you can program the message into your software to automatically send after you close a sale.

·     Create spreadsheets your teams will use every time they need to execute a process. You can refer to the documents or templates in your procedures to become a part of the workflow.

There are other ways to create timesavers. Simple notifications can make a significant difference. Our company produces sales that are large in size but smaller in volume, so everybody on our client-support team receives a message every time there is a sale. This notification has saved us considerable time by simultaneously keeping everyone informed.

Consistency

Spend time thinking about how you wish to format your processes and the documents that support your procedures. Consistent guidelines for document configuration can have an enormous impact on workflow and productivity.

The less time we spend trying to understand how something works, the more time we can focus on the content itself. Consistent formatting also helps us work more quickly because we know and identify the general guidelines. If you multiply this concept throughout an organization, you will save valuable time, which you and your team can use to improve quality overall.

There are many advantages to using consistent guidelines for your documents, processes, and customized input screens. You will spend less time identifying what the document is trying to say because you know where to find the information you need. Also, if the same formatting is used in every spreadsheet, users will instinctively know what to expect. Each person will be able to quickly find a title and recognize the main takeaways from the document.

With consistent guidelines, you can ensure all your documents and reports will be better because nothing will be missing, and you will be able to find errors more easily. If something is not in line with the general format, it will jump out.

When configuring your processes, aim to standardize titles, list formats, and any codes you may use to identify them. You can organize these by function, department, and user. The more consistently your processes are formatted, the more the user will focus on the content.

Our configuration guidelines for procedures include how we present the content itself and how the processes are categorized. Each action has a header that classifies it by department and process. The objective of this categorization is to make each procedure identifiable by simply looking at the header.

We developed guidelines for the list formats we use within procedures, how we refer to external documents, what spacing we use, and what headers we employ. A consistent format helps the user quickly understand and recognize the flow of a process.

3. Implement and Review

As your company grows, invest in the most sophisticated software to automate workflows that your budget will allow. Every second you save per transaction adds up to minutes and, ultimately, hours.

The software you use will help you manage all the information in your processes. You can program your information system so that your processes appear on the date they need to be executed. The software will also assign them to the responsible party. You can collaborate on processes as a team and update them as necessary.

If the software you use is easily customized, you can tweak it so it saves steps. Simple changes can improve how your team communicates and can also reduce errors. We often use request forms, one of our process management software’s features. They are entirely customizable, so we can add any field, decide to make it mandatory, and add attachments. At Celaque, we use them for expense and negotiation approvals.

These forms have been beneficial, especially with expense approvals. Sometimes we must make large purchases, and to ensure that we have all done our due diligence, we receive quotes from more than one supplier, and we also make sure we are within budget. To that end, we have added several fields that gather all the necessary information. Using the request forms, we confirm that the expense makes sense, making approving a purchase easy.

Once you have implemented your processes, the next essential step is to follow up carefully to ensure everything flows smoothly. You will likely have to make adjustments based on the feedback you receive from the primary users. Look out for incomplete procedures, duplicated items, problems with timing, and misunderstandings. Please visit www.pamelaayuso.com/heptagram-bonus to download a list to check your processes.

·     Incomplete processes may show up during implementation, which lack critical details.

·     You may discover that parts of the process are duplicated.

·     Once users start working with the procedures and have a clear sense of the work involved, it can become easier to detect that one person has a heavier workload at the beginning of the week or month and lighter at other times.

·     Misunderstandings will occur if your procedures lack clarity. It is best to document processes with enough detail for even new team members to execute them properly.

·     On the other hand, some operations may be too long and need to be summarized or divided into two parts.

4. Modify and Polish

Modify and polish your processes until they shine like jewels. Keep enhancing them, as operations are ever-changing and procedures are never permanent.

Moving to a process-based model is iterative, and the procedures in the firm will be continuously updated and improved as the team provides feedback. You learn about what works best for your situation. Once you have a good base, you can quickly execute modifications due to workflow, personnel, or timing changes.

Processes document how you have completed tasks in the past, how to avoid previous mistakes, and how to improve work quality. If processes remain static as the company’s best rendition of history, learning and adapting to the future will be difficult. Again, procedures must attain equilibrium between “learning from the past and experimenting with and adapting to the future, and between rules and constraints versus freedom and flexibility.”[xi] They need to adapt and respond to the future.

Continue to simplify and automate. If you keep looking, fixing, and streamlining, your improvements will add up over time, and the opportunities are endless. As technology progresses, you can upgrade how you do things ranging from simple time management enhancements to updating to software that better integrates your company’s different departments.

5. Process Maintenance

Processes require maintenance. Employees move to different roles or leave the company, how you operate changes, and the authorities modify regulations. For processes to remain relevant, a business must plan and prepare for change.

When we underwent our process revamp, we did so because we realized that we needed to provide greater transparency so that users could see how the entire process flowed from beginning to end. Users could more easily see how each action was related to the goals of the company.

This finding led to an overhaul of every process and a review of each department's overall workflow. While examining the content in our processes, we discovered things that no longer applied, such as the names of past employees or teams. When we finished, we added a procedure for ensuring that our processes are always up to date.

6. Process Review

An effective review procedure will be thorough. Once you have compiled all the information, you can organize it by team, function, frequency, and assignee.

It is essential to have a master file that includes all the major processes, timing, and responsible parties. With a database of every procedure, you can compare its information against the master file, see if anything has changed, and determine the reason for any alterations.

This master file can point to any issues, such as missing information or room for improvements like shifts in dates or better categorization. It will provide the basis for discussion when the processes team meets with each of the departments.

The idea is that each team devotes time exclusively to the review. I recommend doing this as frequently as necessary, perhaps once or twice a year. The teams will go over each process to ensure it is still applicable and decide if anything can be improved or designed better.

Preferably, the processes team will go over everything with each user. The user may not see how their role fits into the company’s larger picture. Similarly, the processes team will not have the operational context that the users have. Both perspectives can come together to achieve the best possible outcome.

The time spent reviewing processes can be a training opportunity for new team members and a chance for leaders to see the big picture of their daily work. Finally, each team learns how processes work and can make the necessary improvements. Simple adjustments can smooth out the number of tasks at hand and help improve workflows overall.

In the end, make the necessary adjustments and update the processes and the master file. Ensure that you remove all old or irrelevant information and that everything is classified correctly. Performing this maintenance work prevents significant errors from accumulating and will help catch any urgent changes in time.

You may find emerging processes that you wish to document. Please visit www.pamelaayuso.com/heptagram-bonus to download additional material to help you record new procedures.

Fixing Problems in Your Processes

Once you have implemented processes, you will still sometimes run into problems. Perhaps a newsletter did not go out on time, or a report was missing information. It pays to figure out what happened and solve the issue for the future—processes are often a valuable resource for long-term solutions.

It is vital to discover the root of the mistake. A useful technique is the Five Whys approach. Initially developed for the Toyota Company, the Five Whys helps you discover the actual cause of any problem by asking why it happened, then why ithappened, and so forth until you get to the fifth why.[xii]

For the Five Whys to be effective, you must first make sure your problem statements are accurate and that your answers are honest.[xiii] You may also need to determine who had ownership of the subject area through questions such as: Who is currently responsible? Who should be accountable? Do not be surprised if you learn no one was responsible, and that’s why the problem occurred. Timing can also be the source of the issue. Ask: When should it have happened? How often should it be done?

Postmortems, in which the entire team gathers after it has completed a project to discuss what can be improved next time, can also be useful, especially when there is a set process for postmortems. Performing a postmortem involves the exploration of past failures, something people naturally tend to avoid. A structured process will help overcome their hesitancy.

One way to conduct a postmortem review is to create a survey to gather information from the project’s participants. Survey questions can address whether the team properly established lines of responsibility and whether meetings were productive. Postmortems also involve debriefing meetings, metrics analyses, collectively developing a hypothesis about what went wrong, elaborating on obstacles faced, and proposing solutions to prevent future mistakes.

To permanently address failures, you can correct missing items in the company procedures. Last but not least, postmortems’ results should be communicated throughout the company.[xiv]

Communicate and Implement Changes

Everybody involved must understand why the problem occurred and know how it is getting fixed. Communication is a step toward making sure the problem does not happen again.

Problems will always happen. How you and your team react to them will make the most significant difference in your company. As you invest more and more in your processes, they will get better, more comprehensive, and they will make your company more adept at responding to current events.

Even with all the investment of time and effort that processes represent, I do not know how we could have managed to grow without them. Our work as real estate developers is full of details, which may be small but vital.

For years, I wrote reminders to myself at night or on weekends of items missing from our processes to prevent these types of errors. As we improved, we reduced the number of mistakes. It turns out there is a point when operations become more stable, and mistakes become fewer and far between, or as Lucy Maud Montgomery put it in Anne of Green Gables:

"But have you ever noticed one encouraging thing about me, Marilla? I never make the same mistake twice."

"I don't know as that's much benefit when you're always making new ones."

"Oh, don't you see, Marilla? There must be a limit to the mistakes one person can make, and when I get to the end of them, then I'll be through with them. That's a very comforting thought."

Processes have been our key to developing consistency in how we operate. The investment has paid off in providing something that, to me, matters the most: peace of mind.

Key Takeaways

·     Processes are one of the most fundamental tools needed to organize a company.

·     You can set up processes for every significant workflow in your company.

·     Investing the time in creating set procedures for your company will result in greater efficiency because similar tasks are grouped. People on your team will waste less time going from one activity to the next.

·     Processes help people create routines that organize their work and the schedules of others around them.

·     Because responsibilities are clear, each person can take more ownership of the work.

·     Procedures help you save time because you can automate your work, and they provide better results because they ensure consistency.

·     Setting up workflows requires studying the daily tasks you and the rest of the company perform.

·     Procedures can occur recurrently or be triggered by an event. Recurrent processes are those that are repeated the same way, at regular intervals. Sequential processes describe a set of steps that someone takes every time a specific event occurs.

·     Diagrams of how work gets accomplished in your company will help you uncover inefficient processes, potential errors, and heavy workloads.

·     Visualize how you want work to flow in your company and design your procedures to align with that ideal. As you design, remember the OHIO principle and try to group related tasks.

·     Also, classify and organize your processes by significant areas so that they are easy to find and understand.

·     In your design, try to assign full processes and not fragments so that responsibilities are clearer.

·      Create durable and flexible procedures that will be able to evolve with your company.

·      Find ways to save time as you craft your procedures and make sure that they are consistently formatted.

·      Implement your procedures and make sure you follow up to ensure they are working well.

·      Processes require maintenance, and they can always be improved. Make sure you set time and resources aside to take care of what you have implemented.

[i]. Galbraith, Designing Organizations, 40.

[ii]. Klara Palmberg, “Exploring Process Management: Are There Any Widespread Models and Definitions?” TQM Journal 21, no. 2 (May 2009): 203–15.

[iii]. Sergey Smirnov et al., “Business Process Model Abstraction: A Definition, Catalog, and Survey.” Distributed and Parallel Databases 30, no. 1 (February 1, 2012): 63–99, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-011-7088-5.

[iv]. Galbraith, Designing Organizations, 38-40.

[v]. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Concentrated Knowledge for the Busy Executive (Kennett Square, PA: Random House, 2012), 17-18.

[vi]. Ayelet Fishbach, “How to Keep Working When You’re Just Not Feeling It: Four Strategies for Motivating Yourself.” Harvard Business Review 96, no 6 (2018): 138-141.

[vii]. Adam M. Grant, “Employees without a Cause: The Motivational Effects of Prosocial Impact in Public Service.” International Public Management Journal 11, no. 1 (April 2008): 48–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/10967490801887905.

[viii]. Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein, “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability.,” Journal of Risk & Uncertainty 26, no. 1 (January 2003): 5–16, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022299422219.

[ix]. Robert A. Karasek, “Job Demands, Job Decision Latitude, and Mental Strain: Implications for Job Redesign.” Administrative Science Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1979): 285–308, https://doi.org/10.2307/2392498.

[x]. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, 1st edition (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 120.

[xi]. Ann Lindsay, Denise Downs, and Ken Lunn, “Business Processes—Attempts to Find a Definition.” Information and Software Technology 45, no. 15 (January 1, 2003): 1015–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0950-5849(03)00129-0.

[xii]. K. Sugitani and H. Morita, “The Approach for Skill up in Five-Why for Investigating Root Cause of Quality Problems.” International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies 3, no. 3 (01 2011): 221–40, https://doi.org/10.1504/IJDATS.2011.041332.

[xiii]. Olivier Serrat, “The Five Whys Technique.” International Publications, February 1, 2009, https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/intl/198.

[xiv]. Bonnie Collier and Tom DeMarco, “A Defined Process for Project Postmortem Review.” IEEE Software 13, no. 4 (July 1996): 65, https://doi.org/10.1109/52.526833.