How to Prevent Mistakes Before They Happen

Over this past quarter my team at SmartDraw worked on a slew of new and experimental initiatives – nobody had any truly applicable prior experience with this particular type of work. As a result there was confusion amongst the team regarding responsibilities which led to a lot of trial and error which delayed the completion of several of our new projects.

After a few weeks of this we found the source of the confusion and worked together to help prevent errors from delaying any future initiatives of this same type. Here is what we did to prevent errors before they happened:

Decompose projects with mind maps to cover all of the bases

How often have you had a project come to a grinding halt as a result of a minor detail being overlooked? There’s the housing contractor who forgot to bring the right kind of nails to a construction site or the salesman who forgot to bring a stack of business cards to a trade show. A “small” detail like business cards at a trade show can explode into a much bigger problem, like lost sales opportunities and less revenue.

One way my team and I prevent “small details” from becoming “big problems” is to decompose our projects ahead of time with a mind map. I’ve written before about using mind maps to decompose big tasks in order to schedule projects accurately, and the decomposition method also applies when used to prevent errors.

Consider an example: if you’re planning an orientation program for new employees (a bi g project) you might start off with a simple mind map like this one:

You’re going to use the mind map to try to anticipate problems with the content of your orientation program. You add a few sub topics to your mind map to go into more detail on each aspect of your orientation program starting with your explanation of the company’s IT systems.

And one more level of sub-topics to go into more detail on the specific systems.

If you’re a HR person, this might be the level of detail you need to start with to anticipate problems with your “New Employee Orientation” program. Perhaps your customer-facing departments like sales and customer service use a different phone system than internal departments like the IT team.

If you taught all of the new employees only one phone system they might fumble the ball the first time they needed to transfer a call to another internal extension if they weren’t using the same one included in the orientation materials. This is a “small detail” that you might overlook were it not for decomposing your entire orientation program using a mind map. The act of thinking through all the details helps you anticipate problems in advance.

Build “blueprints” of all of your projects

I use the word “blueprint” instead of “plan” because a blueprint contains details about how every piece of the project fits together. It’s a schematic for all of the separate components in a project, rather than just a broad overview, which is what plans often are.

One of the things that my team at SmartDraw did was get into the habit of using blueprints to illustrate how everyone’s work came together in the form of a completed product.

When I built my blueprints I used web page annotations (we work in web marketing) to communicate what needed to be done and mind maps to illustrate how individual pages fit in with into the big picture, and this technique has proven to be a reliable method to eliminate most of the confusion surrounding our projects.

Here’s an example of a real blueprint that we used to help plan an eCourse that we launched back in December:

Click here for a full-sized version of this image.

The blueprint is extremely simple, but it proved to be extremely effective for my team. However, the big reason that we could use such a simple blueprint like this to sufficiently clarify a much larger project was because we also developed standard processes for streamlining projects similar to this one.

Develop standard processes

We beat this subject like a dead horse, but that’s only because it’s a subject that needs to be iterated over and over again in order to make people more productive. All of your team’s work should consist of standard processes – they help eliminate errors, but they also help you ensure that your team is following the most efficient methods possible and they make your output more consistent, which makes it easier to measure the quality of your team’s work.

If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your team’s work using processes, click here to sign up for our free eCourse entitled How to Optimize a Business Process.

Go through your blueprints, processes, and other planning materials with your team before you begin work

If you’ve gone through the trouble of decomposing your project, building a blueprint, and developing standard processes for your work then it’s a no-brainer to simply run all of those things by your team. Have some extra sets of eyes and minds comb over the details of the project - they might see things that you didn’t or couldn’t see yourself.

Although it’s impossible to prevent every possible error that could surface during the course of a project, you can take steps to drastically cut down on the number of likely errors that may occur with a bit of careful planning. Decomposing a project with mind maps, building a blueprint, developing standard processes, and brainstorming aloud with your team are four effective ways to help anticipate and mitigate problems before they begin – they’ve helped me and my team and they can certainly help you too.

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