The Key to a More Productive Workflow. 2008 Qtr 1
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The Key to a More Productive Workflow.
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Smaller businesses can pretty easily rely on the common sense of each individual employee to see a particular project through all of its stages to completion. The lines of communication tend to be less formal and more open. When a question arises, it’s nothing to walk down the hall to a coworker’s office to discuss it.
But as a business grows, it may experience some significant growing pains. Misunderstandings lead to work being redone. And redone. What’s happening here? The right people are in place. And they have been given the right instructions. Why can’t 30 people work together the way 10 people did?
They can — with a process in place.
A workflow process (or job development process, among other names) is designed specifically to help each employee know what his or her responsibilities are in the life of a project. A process can eliminate gaps, thereby catching oversights and mistakes, as well as reduce redundancies that fuel inefficiency. A process gets everyone on the same page and can mean the difference between a profitable job that gets delivered and billed, and a nightmare that never seems to go away.
Where to begin?
A great way to start developing a process is to assign one member from each (and every) department to a “process improvement team.” Have each team member map out his own portion of a typical job the way he would like to see it flow through the system, ideally. Make sure the team assigns quality control checkpoints, addresses the sore spots, scrutinizes the amount of paperwork, and rethinks how often each job is being checked for accuracy. With the team, revisit every step, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Then draw it. Yes, draw it. It’s amazing how quickly a visual reference can communicate to a diverse group of people.
Roll out your new process slowly.
Try it out on a single real job, from start to finish, where the team can test their ideas and see when, where and how those sub-processes succeed or fail. After you’ve established some confidence in the new process, introduce it to the entire company to get their feedback — which there will probably be a lot of. (That’s why it’s a good idea to set the implementation date out two or three months.) Rework what needs to be, then launch.
Over time, there will be some unavoidable kinks, and you’ll find that not every single step will sink in. But there will be two, three, or four winners that employees will embrace — and that will catch more mistakes, make everyone’s job more enjoyable, speed production, increase profitability and make you a hero in your customers’ eyes.
Hero. Yeah, there’s a process for that.
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