Working Smarter : Business Processes

What Happens When the Top Dog Leaves?

Rich — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:45:00 GMT

Departing employees can have a tremendous impact on an organization if it is not properly prepared and equipped to handle it – especially if the employee is one of the “Top Dogs.”

How the departure affects your productivity

Ready or not, a whirlwind of a ride may await you unless you have done some basic preparation. No matter if you are the receptionist, or the next senior level manager to serve as the interim leader during the transition, you will be affected in some form or another. Your time will be divided exponentially due to the acquisition of new tasks, and the learning curve those tasks will require. In addition, your “usual” activities may get pushed somewhat to the background and can get overlooked if you are not careful.

Projects, tasks, and decisions may proceed more slowly if you are not prepared. So, what can you do to keep moving forward with a full head of steam? Document your responsibilities.

Begin by documenting all that you do, all that you are responsible for prior to the shift, and everything you take on during the transition. Document all of your projects, tasks, and decisions that you are involved with to standardize and organize them.

Once you have accomplished this you will be in a better position to organize and delegate some smaller oriented tasks out to your team. You will also be able to properly communicate expectations and how things are to be handled during the transition. This will also allow you to be able to bring the new “Chief” up to speed more quickly once the vacant role is filled.

How the departure affects general functions and processes

Does your business run on people and anecdotal information? Meaning, do things happen when the “top dog” says it should, and how it should? If so, you may find that company processes, projects, tasks, and management decisions will grind to a halt upon the departure of this person unless you get the processes and projects documented and systematized. When you move in this direction, you will find that you are not completely dependent upon people for the processes and projects to move forward, but more on a system that works and functions nearly independently and therefore managed by its people.

For example, say the departing leader has a specific decision making process proven to be successful (shown below) as to which projects are pursued, and which are not. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what that process is, and refer to it during the transition? Of course it would. So acquire the information and create easy to understand visuals, like decision trees and flowcharts that serve as reference guides for you to be able to make good consistent decisions and keep progress moving in a forward direction in the same manner prior to the leader’s departure.

Click here to see a larger version of this visual.

The final task is how you communicate this back to your team. The repurposing of projects and tasks can be an emotional proposition for some as time and energy may already have been invested, so you will need to clearly communicate the reasoning behind any changes. The remedy? Share your visuals like the one above so that they understand how specific processes and decisions are made. The more transparent the process and decision making is, the more on board your employees will be about the procedures. Also, you avoid the same previous problem of having only one person with the understanding of the company “knowledge bank” and you forge trust and team communication amongst everyone.

The personnel of the organization are the most impacted when there are departures, and if processes and other pertinent information are stored anecdotally within only a few people then everyone feels the pain – including you. Take the time to document, organize, evaluate and communicate your processes, projects and decisions to keep your organization stable.

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In Bad Times, We Need to Get Back to Basics

Rich — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:46:00 GMT

Managers these days have to reevaluate everything – processes, projects, team organization among many others. What was working for your team two years ago, one year ago and even only a couple of months ago is not necessarily working now. The volatility of the market has drastically changed the way business is conducted for many organizations, so what has your team done to adapt?

As a manager, part of your responsibility is to recognize when it is necessary to modify your team’s behavior and to determine how to best modify it. Otherwise, the results for your organization could be disastrous. Costs will be too high, goals won’t be achieved, and spirits will be low.

For example, let’s say you are a manager of a sales team, and you are provided a report (like the one below) from the accounting department which indicates that sales are flattening and expenses are gradually rising. Instinctively you know that some of this is due to the economic downturn, but you also recognize that there is a direct impact from the behaviors of your team too.

You have five sales people on the team, including yourself. Although sales for every team member across the board is down, you discover that the slump is hitting three team members harder than yourself and one other. The other productive person on year team consistently leads the team in sales volume and also follows the formula and protocol designed and proven to keep sales performance high.

The other three people had performed fairly well in terms of volume and sales revenue until recent months. Why is that? As the manager, you believe that it’s the fact that these other three people have not been following the standard, proven sales processes. When sales were up it wasn’t an issue, but now that sales are falling you want everyone to return to basics and become more efficient.

After looking into it you verify that your conclusion is correct: your lower performing sales team members haven’t stuck to the standard process and that has negatively impacted their performance. You decide that it’s time to get those sales team members to adapt and change their behavior by conforming to the standard, more productive sales process.

So you create a visual like the one below which depicts your organization’s sales funnel.

In a meeting with your team you discuss the report given to you by accounting and the sales funnel. Although the sales funnel is a simple rendering of the typical approach in moving prospects through the sales cycle, the point is to have the team remaining focused by exhibiting and illustrating the behaviors and functions of what has proven to be a successful formula for the organization.

It is important that the team understand that the way they conducted themselves previously is no longer working, so they need to return to the basics of sales and sales process – the “blocking and tackling.” You as the manager cannot change what is happening around you in the marketplace, but you can alter the behaviors of you and your team to adapt to those changes which will have an impact on the processes and projects they are responsible to carry out. Have you and your team adapted?

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The Synergy between Process and Roles in Your Organization

Rich — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:48:00 GMT

You may know your coworkers' place in the organization, but where do they fit in a process? How has disorganization and proper role comprehension disrupted your business?

As a manager, you know in theory and within your own mind how a particular project should move forward. And you know how each person on your team plays a part in that process leading to the final completion of the project. But, are you communicating both of those items clearly to your team?

Be honest. How organized is your team? How organized are your projects?

Most of the time, when an employee begins at a new company, or begins a new role within a company, that person is handed an organizational chart illustrating who each person in the company reports to. And most of the time the explanation of how this new person is to contribute to a particular process is never mentioned. The manager simply assumes that the new person already knows, or that the new person will ask the appropriate questions for clarity when the need comes up. Beyond that, roles and process are seldom revisited in conversation. And they should be part of your daily conversation with your team.

Each role filled by a member of your team contributes in varying ways to multiple projects and tasks. So, why are these conversations not taking place? And if they are, how can you clearly communicate to each member of your team their role and the relationship it has to each project?

Let’s answer a question with a question - Why not return to the tools you already have (or should have) at your disposal for the solution? Here’s an example:

Ok, so you are a Marketing Director, and you are developing a new campaign for your product line due to the changing of the economic conditions. Since there have been so many changes to your department recently, you decide to create an updated org chart and present it at the next department meeting.

This visual obviously works well in identifying the roles people will play in producing the deliverables for the new campaign; however you want to be clear that everyone understands the proper process the campaign needs to go through so you create a process map and walk through it with your team.

Click here to see a larger version of this image.

The process above illustrates the general procedure of the creation of the new campaign, and the initials in the boxes along with the color coding indicate the team member(s) responsible for the associated task; ultimately leading each person to a better understanding of how the building of the new campaign work is to flow from start to finish.

What you are able to do now is communicate to your team the role they play in the organization, and how that role fits into this particular project process of creating a new campaign.

From our example you can see that Jeremy Yates is responsible for beginning the drafting of the campaign message following the presentation of the research given by Thomas and Carlos, and then submit to Jan for proofing and editing (see below).

You don’t have to necessarily recreate the wheel in order to have better understanding of roles and functions from the people you work with. You simply need to focus on how to better communicate with your team on how each is an important participant to the team and the process by revisiting the subject on an ongoing basis.

What you will find is that your processes will improve, your projects and tasks become more organized and your people work smarter.

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Five Signs that Your Team is Disorganized

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:12:00 GMT

Good managers by nature are “organized” people—they often are great at organizing their own work and thoughts, but their self-organization rarely carries over to the groups of people who report to them. If disorganization were easy to detect and diagnose, most managers would undoubtedly do something about it—but it’s not.

More often than not, disorganization is something that becomes deeply ingrained into the modus operandi of an organization—managers just assume they need five status meetings a week with their team because that’s how they’ve always done things. They assume they routinely need to tell their team members where they can find important documents because that’s the way things have always been.

Disorganization becomes part of the organization if it’s allowed to linger for too long, and this costs the organization thousands upon thousands of dollars of lost employee time or other resources over several years.

So how do you know if your business is suffering from endemic disorganization? How can you spot the organizational deficiencies which eat away at your time and money? Here are the five tell-tale signs that your team is disorganized:

You constantly have to explain who, what, when, where, why, and how to your team. Even though your team has been doing this for years now, every time you ask them to do something, they bombard you with questions you’ve undoubtedly heard before. “Where do we need to go?” “What do we need to do?” “How are we supposed to do it again?” And so forth. This indicates that your team or business is organizationally challenged when it comes to training and explaining new processes to team members.
Inconsistent results. If you ask your team to do the same thing twice, you get two completely different results; chances are your team needs better organization when it comes to quality assurance and oversight—someone needs to review work and provide honest feedback as to what the team is doing well or poorly.
Some tasks routinely take significantly more time to complete than they should. It shouldn’t take five days to answer a customer’s tech support request; it shouldn’t take ten days to ship on order; and it shouldn’t take two hours to upload a webpage. If some of your organization’s tasks take an inexplicably long time to complete, the processes used to complete those tasks are the root cause of the organizational problem—lack of process is usually the culprit in these instances.
Key documents / items / information routinely go missing. Your team members have a lot of trouble remembering where key pieces of information or pieces of equipment are placed. “Where’s the key for the forklift?” “Where’s last year’s shipping manifest?” And so forth. This indicates that your team has a difficult time organizing and documenting its resources, whether they are material resources or informational.
Errors occur frequently. Things seem to go wrong and they go wrong often. This can be caused by a number of organizational issues, the most common of which is “roles and responsibilities.” Disorganized teams tend to err frequently because nobody feels that they truly own their work; thus, they feel as though any errors that occur are “somebody else’s problem.” This occurs because the roles and responsibilities of each team member are unclear or undefined.

If you recognize any of these five signs within your own team then you know you’ve got a problem with organization. What can do you to start correcting it? The first place to start is to analyze your existing processes and identify the trouble spots.

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New eCourse: How to Manage a Sales Process

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:10:00 GMT

How to Manage a Sales Process is the third “recession-proofing” eCourse that we made available to the public beginning last week.

This eCourse is based on a post that I wrote a while back called “Can You Increase Sales in the Face of Recession?” The premise here is that new sales leads are going to be more difficult to come by during economically lean times like these; thus, it’s essential that you improve your close rate and do more business with the leads that you have.

So how can you improve your close rate? Well, among other things, a good way to start is to have your sales team adopt a more efficient sales process. “But how do I determine what the most efficient sales process is?” you ask?

This eCourse is the answer to that question. If you sign up for How to Manage a Sales Process, you will learn how to analyze your existing sales processes and locate areas for improvement. Click here to sign up.

About Working Smarter’s eCourses

All of our eCourses are free and delivered via email. You will receive the first lesson immediately upon sign-up and you should receive the others via email every two to three days, until you have read all of the lessons. If you would like to skip ahead to read other lessons immediately, you can do so.

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New eCourse: How to Optimize a Business Process

Aaron Stannard — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Recently we announced three new eCourses designed to help your business soften the blow from the recession. Most recently, we introduced How to Manage a Project as part of our growing collection of publicly available eCourses. Today I’d like to discuss another one of our new eCourses: How to Optimize a Business Process.

During times of uncertainty, companies are often forced to cut their payroll. It’s a shame, but it’s an inevitable consequence of economic turmoil. So if you’re forced to cut part of your payroll, how can you ensure that your team’s productivity doesn’t slip?

The easiest way to cut your payroll but maintain your output is to create a standard procedure for all of the operations you repeat every day: processing orders, shipping product, servicing field calls, making sales calls and so on. Then make sure everyone follows it. This buys you three things:

1. You are more productive. By optimizing the procedure everyone does the job in the most efficient way.

2. Your quality is higher. You make fewer mistakes. You get the same predictable outcome, no matter who does the job.

3. Your workforce is more flexible. You can easily train more people to do the job.

With increased productivity, better quality and a more flexible workforce, you can reduce your headcount, lower your costs and still get the same (or more) work done. Want to learn how to implement a standard process in your own organization? Then click here to sign up for How to Optimize a Business Process.

About Working Smarter’s eCourses

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Three New eCourses to Help You Recession-Proof Your Business Now

Aaron Stannard — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:59:00 GMT

Economic times are tough, and will be for a while. Now is the time to cut fat without cutting muscle. But how do you actually do it?

Well, fortunately we have three new eCourses which will help provide you with some basic ideas on how you can:

Cut operating costs without cutting output;
Prevent projects from running over-budget;
And maintain or even increase sales despite the recession.

As regular Working Smarter readers are aware, we launched what we promised would be “the first of many” eCourses in December 2008. Today we’re announcing three more additional eCourses that are available to the public, for free. Here they are:

How to Manage a Project

A lesson that we have often repeated on Working Smarter time and time again is that most projects run late because they are not managed sufficiently. We’ve compiled all of our advice regarding project management into a single eCourse which will help provide you with a clear idea on how to:

Properly decompose tasks;
Schedule tasks using a Gantt Chart;
Assign the right people to the right tasks;
And measure progress using milestones.

If this is something you might be interested in, click here to sign up for How to Manage a Project.

How to Optimize a Business Process

One of the best things you can do to help soften the recession’s blow to your company is to streamline your operations using standard business processes. Streamlined operations help your company cut costs without adversely affecting output by:

Ensuring that all team members are using the most efficient method possible to do their work;
Making the output of all work more consistent, also enabling you to quantifiably measure the quality of your output;
Making it easier for you train new employees or cross-train old ones;
And making it easier for you to identify production bottlenecks.

Like project management, this is a subject that we’ve blogged about frequently on Working Smarter. We’ve gotten a lot of customer feedback on the subject and much of it has been incorporated into this eCourse. So if you’re interested, click here to sign up for How to Optimize a Business Process.

How to Manage a Sales Process

The most visible effect of the recession is the slide in consumer confidence, which ultimately reduces sales. This last “recession-proofing” eCourse that we’ve developed is an adaptation of our How to Optimize a Business Process eCourse, which goes through a sales process in detail and demonstrates how you can optimize it to close more sales despite a decreased number of leads.

Click here to sign up for How to Manage a Sales Process.

About Working Smarter’s eCourses

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The D-O-C-E Method of Productivity Improvement

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:35:00 GMT

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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Can You Increase Sales in the Face of Recession?

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:22:00 GMT

The first instinct of many businesses in the face of recession is to go into the crouch position and start cutting costs immediately. Cutting costs is certainly one strategy to help maintain a healthy bottom line, but shouldn’t you and every other business owner consider an additional second option: trying to maintain or even increase sales?

While it can be difficult and expensive to invent new ways to generate sales leads, you can certainly do a better job closing more of the leads that you already have. And that’s the subject of this article: even in times of uncertainty, you can still increase your revenue to higher levels than it was previously, if you handle your business correctly and improve your existing sales activities in the two following ways:

Optimize Your Sales Team’s Operations

You might have a team of three to five people who try to contact leads and sell quantities of your product. Let’s suppose that John is your star salesperson; he has the highest close rate and has been the top performer year after year. Here’s what he does:

John is a terrific salesperson; if he issues a quote, then he is probably going to make a sale. Your other sales people, Jack and Jill, are not nearly as good as John is. Here’s what they do:

Jack and Jill waste a lot of leads by delivering boilerplate pitches and they waste a lot of their own time by not making sure that they are pitching to qualified leads only. This is why John’s performance is far superior to theirs.

So how many Jacks and Jills do you have on your sales team? How much more money could Jack and Jill earn for your business if you took the time to understand John’s sales process?

Think about it. If Jack and Jill learned John’s sales process they would:

Spend more time pursuing qualified leads only;
Tailor pitches to suit the needs of specific clients and close more leads;
And lastly, Jack and Jill would close leads faster and thus actually pursue and qualify a greater number of leads.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving your sales process—you can also use a sales funnel to analyze where leads are being lost most often and retune your marketing efforts there.

Close More Leads by Customizing Sales Pitches

Good sales people know that cold-calling clients and delivering a scripted sales pitch, without accounting for the needs and pains of potential clients, is an ineffective way of conducting business. Moreover, you get better results by tailoring pitches to the needs of individual clients.

Your sales people don’t have many chances to make first impressions, so why not impress your potential new customers by:

Beginning by speaking exactly to the customer’s pain;
Identifying the problems that create the customer’s pain;
And following up with an articulate explanation of how your company and its products or services can solve the customer’s pain.

No two customers’ pains are going to be exactly the same so it requires some due diligence on the part of your sales people to determine what those pains are—but it is well worth the effort. It gets the attention of your potential customers and it speaks directly to their concerns; ultimately, this will help you close more leads.

So the next time you set about designing a PowerPoint presentation for a sales pitch or a prospecting meeting, bear in mind the pains of your potential customers and offer solutions rather than products.

If you’d like to try optimizing your sales team’s process with a flowchart, feel free to download a free trial of SmartDraw.

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