The D-O-C-E Method of Productivity Improvement
If there’s one way to improve your organization’s productivity, it’s by streamlining your organization’s operations using processes. Processes help businesses eliminate key HR issues and boost productivity by introducing standard methods for completing routine tasks; this ultimately increases net output and quality without requiring additional production resources.
Taking the time to order the chaos in your organization’s operations is well worth it. SmartDraw.com itself has seen significant increases in productivity as a result of standardizing its own operations using processes—and so have many of our customers, including the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, more commonly referred to as the FDA.
The D-O-C-E Method
So what does an organization need to do in order to standardize their operations? Simply stated, they need to follow the D-O-C-E method, which stands for Document, Optimize, Communicate and Execute.
Here’s how the method works:
Document the routines that every employee follows in order to complete their daily tasks. There are inevitably going to be a number of variations between all of the processes followed for each individual employee, and all of these variations need to be recorded and documented before we can develop a standard, optimized process. A flowchart is the best tool for the job, for reasons which will become obvious once you reach the next step.
Optimize your routines by constructing a single, standard process from the processes of individual employees which you documented earlier. Analyze the flowcharts you built; determine which components of each individual process are the most efficient out of the entire lot; and build your standard process from those very parts.
Without a flowchart, this step is nearly impossible—the ability to casually look over a flowchart and immediately identify potential bottlenecks is something that every other form of process documentation lacks. Additionally, flowcharts enable managers to easily model and evaluate new processes, which will ultimately help them produce more efficient, productive processes.
Communicate the improved business processes to your team and inform them of the coming changes. Since you optimized your process using a flowchart, you can reuse the flowchart as a communicative instrument either by printing it and distributing it by hand, by emailing it to team members, or by using it in a presentation.
Execute the improved process and increase your organization’s productivity—and check in on your team from time to time to make sure that they follow your process.
Should you follow the DOCE method, you’ll see an increase in consistency, quality of output, and productivity throughout your organization. The method is as simple as it is effective, and we highly recommend it to anyone who’s listening.
If you’d like to try optimizing your organization’s processes with a flowchart, feel free to download a free trial of SmartDraw.
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