Stop Reinventing the Wheel
Imagine this scenario: It’s 2008, you're a multinational coffee conglomerate named Starbucks; your business is in a crunch and you have to start closing stores.
You can't just close down any store—you have to close down the stores that are in close proximity to another Starbucks or stores that were never great performers to begin with. If you close down the wrong store you can end up losing a lot more business than you anticipated, so each closure has to be carefully considered. What do you do?
- Have your regional managers act by the seat of their pants without any direction (chaos)?
- Develop a standard way to close suitable store locations / sell off assets and subsequently train your regional managers to follow this process (order)?
The decision is not hard—you're going to want to develop a standard way, a process, to handle this routine. Your work should always be a process!
"Reinventing the Wheel" Happens Every Day
A big multinational company like Starbucks doesn't reinvent the wheel—a business can't reach that kind of scale if every employee has to do everything by the seat of his or her pants. But what about smaller organizations?
A lot of private individuals and small organizations suffer from the "reinventing the wheel" problem - every time someone has to handle a new task, he or she does it by the seat of his or her pants a few times and sticks with whatever kind of, sort of worked best. Most people aren't given any processes or any context to work from—instead they're thrown a bunch of old documents and told to make it happen.
All of the specialized knowledge used by former occupants of that position, their cumulative specialized knowledge being "the wheel," has to be reinvented every time there's a personnel change in many organizations.
Most people don't even consider the possibility of formally defining a process, and as a result, a lot of man-hours are wasted engaging in low value "invent the wheel, again" activities. This wastes money, wastes time, creates frustration, and ultimately hinders you from being as efficient as possible.
An Example: New PR Guy
Let's say you have only one PR person and he leaves your company, so you move a person in your organization away from sales and put them into a public relations role—you believe they can do it based on how well they've represented the company to potential customers, so you hand them over some materials from the last PR person, run them through a cursory training course, and send them off. Did you tell your new PR person how to write a news release? How about how to send the news release over a press wire? Most managers would answer "No - they can figure it out." And that's a problem.
Most managers figure that the new PR person will take a few days to figure things out but after that, he or she will start trucking along with his or her new PR responsibilities. What the managers don't take into account are the costs of letting all of the previous PR person’s experience go to waste!
All of the specialized knowledge needed to conduct PR for the organization takes years and years to master, but it all goes to waste as soon as one person leaves and another steps in because no one bothered to build a blueprint using process - and that's the essence of "reinventing the wheel."
All of that time your new PR person has to spend perfecting and mastering his or her new responsibilities is wasted time—the last person already figured that stuff out. By not taking the time to document and define actual business processes for your company's PR, you've doomed them to spend a lot of their time figuring everything out from scratch again.
How to Stop Reinventing the Wheel
Every organization that's ever wanted to scale has already figured out how to step reinventing the wheel: invent it once and show everyone else how to use it! You stop inventing the wheel by defining business processes—that's how it's done!
Flowcharts are an obvious, intuitive tool for defining processes. As long as you do ANYTHING to try and capture your organization's routines into processes, you'll be better off when it comes time to assign new responsibilities or hire new people. I'll be posting more about using capturing and formalizing business processes when we return from the weekend.
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