Working Smarter : Flowcharts

The Four Most Common Marketing Mistakes Every Manager Makes

Rich — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Mistakes result in lost business, time, and resources. Nobody is perfect, but it is everyone’s responsibility to minimize errors and make the best decisions possible.

Below are examples of routinely made poor decisions and big picture blunders that you can avoid as a manager, marketer, or business owner. How many of these do you routinely commit?

Failing to properly understand your market – Don’t think that because you have found success in one geographic region that the same plan will have the same or better results in other regions.

Take the time to understand your target market, how your product is positioned in that market, and how to properly communicate the benefits. Seems simple and logical enough, but even big companies make this mistake.

Legend has it that when a large American manufacturer of baby food first decided to introduce their brand in Africa, sales were sluggish. After looking into the matter, the company discovered that their trademark baby picture on the label was a hindrance because most products sold in Africa with pictures on the labels were used to communicate the contents of the package because of the low literacy rate. Whether legend or an enormous management mistake, it does serve as a reminder that not taking the time to understand who you are selling to can be disastrous.

Resisting change – Sometimes your routine and the your team’s routine need to change. In one of my previous posts, “In Bad Times, We Need to Get Back to Basics,” I describe this in greater detail, but the essential thing to keep in mind is that as a manager you constantly need to evaluate your processes and projects to determine if they are still viable. If not, and yet you continue to proceed with them, the results may not meet your expectations-.

You should keep your fingers on the pulse of your business so that if there is a shift in your market or industry, you can notice it, understand it, and make the proper adjustments.

Thinking “my product is so good it sells itself” – I think of that line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come” when I hear a business owner or sales person say that their product sells itself. It’s great to be confident and proud of what you sell, but are you sure you want to hang your hat on your confidence alone? 80% of small businesses fail within the first year of opening and I bet that none of these failed owners would have opened the business in the first place had they known it would fail by year’s end. And what is the most common mistake these failed owners make? They don’t invest sufficient time into marketing their business.

Never documenting processes (or anything else) – Let’s face it we live in a “what have you done for me lately” business culture, and as a manager you have to keep up with the competition or your business can be in serious trouble. However, the need to document and communicate processes is vitally important to the survival and growth of your organization, yet it is routinely passed up for other matters.

Documenting processes gives you the ability to standardize procedures which will help you work more productively and efficiently and train new employees. If the processes are not documented, this becomes far more difficult to facilitate. For example, perhaps you hire a new employee to work as a staff copywriter and proofreader. To begin getting the person experience and up to speed with your companies processes, you task the person to proofread all of the copy developed from the staff writers. You share the flowchart below with the new employee to understand how the copywriting process proceeds and so that he knows what to do next when he receives material for his review.

Because you have taken the time to properly document the process, the employee now has a visual representation for him to reference when the task needs to be performed. By doing this, you will find that you will spend a lot less time explaining company and team processes, and the delegated tasks will be done the correct way each time cutting down mistakes. Also, new employees will get up to speed more quickly, and seasoned employees will remain focused.

Producing results, minimizing errors, and making informed decisions are the centralized responsibilities of any manager.

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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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Three Ways Our Customers Are Fighting the Recession

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:32:00 GMT

The economic climate as of late has become demonstrably unstable and, as a result, many businesses are battening down the hatches and making preparations for the upcoming fiscal year. This means cutting down on operating costs, eliminating projects that don’t have an immediate impact on the bottom line, and implementing other cost-cutting initiatives.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be publishing a lot of material which will provide you with some ideas to help you find ways to tighten your belts. Today we’re going to provide you with a preview.

Here are three strategies that we’ve received from customer case studies regarding how they’ve improved their bottom lines in the face of recession:

A Major U.S. Health System Saved $1,000,000 per Month by Optimizing Processes

The more time a patient spends in a hospital, the greater the cost to the hospital. So it is no wonder that one of our customers, a major U.S. non-profit healthcare system, was under the gun to increase its patient throughput. By documenting the existing hospitals’ business processes with flowcharts, our customer was able to identify and correct major inefficiencies throughout the healthcare system’s operations. This netted them a savings of roughly one million dollars per month as a result of increased patient throughput.

A Small Business Saved $20,000 per Year by In-Sourcing Marketing Materials

A small business that specializes in brokering industrial property solutions was able to save approximately $20,000 per year by drawing a large portion of its own marketing materials, namely floor plans and landscapes, using a copy of our software instead of relying on expensive third-party graphic artists to do the work.

A Major Charity Saves 100 Person-Hours per Month by Improving Project Management

A major charitable organization in the U.S. uses SmartDraw routinely to create training materials using flowcharts and mind maps. These types of diagrams are self-explanatory and thus require less explanation and communication with instructors. Most recently, they took advantage of SmartDraw’s project management capabilities to simplify a major IT system migration, saving the organization even more time and money. The charity estimates that its routine use of these visual management and communication mechanisms helps them save roughly 100 person-hours per month.

In the upcoming weeks, we’re going to be publishing an extensive amount of material which will tell you how to recession-proof your business and get the most of your organization during economically turbulent times—so stay tuned!

Discussion: How Are You Cutting Costs?

We’re pleased to share with you some stories of how other SmartDraw customers are saving money in the down economy by cutting costs. But we’d also like to encourage you to share your success stories with us here on the blog by leaving a comment below. How have you been able to cut costs in the face of a possible recession? Have you found any of the techniques that you’ve read about on Working Smarter to be helpful?

Please let us and other readers know!

If you want to try building your own mind maps, project charts, flowcharts, or anything else mentioned in this article then you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.

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Three Examples of How Processes Improved Our Operations

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:32:00 GMT

In this screencast I quickly review what we've covered in August with respect to business processes, i.e. why businesses need processes, the key employee problem, and so forth. But the real core of this presentation are the three examples of how we've been able to use business processes to improve our own operations here at SmartDraw.com; in these examples I explain what the problems in our organization were and how we were able to largely solve those problems with processes.

For those of you who have been hungry for some real examples this should satisfy your appetite.

This SmartDraw screencast requires plug-ins enabled and the latest Adobe Flash Player installed.

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Stop Reinventing the Wheel

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:02:00 GMT

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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How to Capture Business Processes

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:30:00 GMT

Last week I wrote about what businesses need in order to grow without the growing pains. In those posts, I talked about the benefits of using processes to avoid unnecessary overhead (reinventing the wheel) and to accommodate growth.

Business processes can be harder to capture for some industries than for others. There's an entire science dedicated to developing solid business processes for the IT and software sectors, so my advice can't possibly do justice to every single business need imaginable—I can certainly try though.

This may seem like recursive logic, but there's actually a process to capturing a process:

Ask the veteran employees, the people who've been performing the business routine in question, what the first step of the process is.
With that answer in hand, ask them about the next step.
With each new step, determine if there are any "branches" in the process and follow those branches out into their entirety (we call these "decisions" in the language of flowcharting).
Repeat this process until you have recorded all of the steps of the business process in question.
Document the business process in an electronic document (typically, a flowchart is used).
Store the document into your organization's knowledge repository.
Refer to the document whenever someone needs to learn the business process in question.

Let's go ahead and review an example of how to achieve this.

Example: Expanding the Shipping Department

You manage the shipping department for a company that warehouses and distributes consumer electronics to local retailers. The holiday season is coming up soon and your company is going to start moving more inventories at a faster pace. Your boss asks you to add some new employees to the shipping department to take on the increased workload. However, you don't have any training materials prepared—what do you do?

In the scenario that I've described, your boss is really asking you to capture all of the processes required to do the work of your shipping department. So how do you do it? The simple answer is that capturing business processes consists of asking your veteran employees some pointed questions about their work routines and recording the answers. Let's explore that first before we step into some of the nuances.

Asking the Right Questions

The first thing you'd want to do in this scenario is approach your veterans, your existing employees, and simply ask some questions. Here's how it might play out:

Manager (You): When you need to fill an order, what's the first thing that you do?

Shipping Clerk: First, I get the highest priority order number out of the queue via our terminal, and then I double-check to make sure that the order is not a duplicate.

Therefore, the first step of your process is getting the order out of the terminal. The second step is checking to see if it's a duplicate.

Manager (You): What do you do if an order is a duplicate?

Shipping Clerk: I check to see if one of the duplicates has already been filled, and...

You can see where I'm going with this. You probably already know the answers to your own questions, but you need to hear how he does it. Even if you trained him a few years back, it may turn out that things have changed or that the employee himself has found more efficient ways of doing his job—ways that you were not aware of. It's important to document your employee's answers in order to compile them into a universal process.

Documenting the Answers

A flowchart is the best way to go for mapping a process—it's a natural method for mapping a process and it's easy to draw. Here's what a flowchart for the start of this process would look like (obviously, this is not the entire flowchart):

If you want a full explanation for how to draw process maps (flowcharts), read our PDF, "Working Smarter with Process Maps."

If it were I in this scenario, I'd stand there with a clipboard, a pad and a pen and draw a flowchart by hand, as the shipping clerk gave me his answers to my questions regarding his order-filling routine. Needless to say, my hand-drawn flowchart would probably be insufficient to use as training material—I'd redo it in a drawing program and commit it to our company's knowledge repository.

Really? It’s that simple?

Not always. Capturing, refining and mapping a shipping process are straightforward compared to developing a process for executing software development projects. However, the approach that I took in this article can be applied broadly across your organization. It might be more difficult to execute in some areas than others might, but generally speaking, it works.

Over the rest of August, I'm going to write a lot more information regarding how you can reap the benefits of processes in your own organization, so you might want to consider subscribing to Working Smarter.

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Why Businesses Need Processes

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:34:00 GMT

Processes are essential to preparing your organization for growth - no large organizations would exist without them, and there's no reason why your small organization shouldn't convert all of its work into processes. Your work should consist of processes where possible.

I've covered the benefits of processes, albeit briefly, but why do businesses need processes? This post is my answer to that question.

A quick note: expect individual posts that provide specifics on how to use processes in order to reap these benefits.

Processes Eliminate Two Key HR Issues

The biggest benefit of processes, in my mind, is that they can drive a stake through the heart of two major HR problems:

The Key Employee Problem
The Specialized Knowledge Problem (Reinventing the Wheel)

The Key Employee Problem is a major concern for small organizations. What happens when Joe, a key employee in one area of your organization, departs suddenly? Joe was the one person who knew exactly how to handle his responsibilities and no one else in the organization knows exactly how he did it. How do you possibly fill that void?

To answer this question, I'm going to borrow a metaphor from Jim Collins' Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies:

Joe is a time-teller. Once Joe is gone, no one else knows how to tell time, and this leaves your organization vulnerable to the key employee problem. Rather than have Joe tell time until the day he decides to leave, have him build a clock instead. This is where processes come into play. Processes are one crucial part of building a clock for your business-they explain how Joe did his job. If Joe builds a clock, everyone will still be able to tell time if Joe leaves.

The Specialized Knowledge Problem is a training/exodus issue similar to the key employee problem. Two jobs with identical job descriptions in two different companies might be vastly different due to the different markets, company culture and millions of other variables-in essence, your current employees have acquired all of the specialized knowledge needed to make your business work.

It can take years, even for experienced professionals, to take hold of all the specialized, organization-specific knowledge required to do the job well. Many companies accidentally let specialized knowledge go to waste when employees leave and they simply expect new hires to "pick it up" along the way. We call this "reinventing the wheel"-businesses lose a lot of utility and productivity from new hires because they have to rediscover all of the knowledge that was lost when the predecessor departed.

Processes can help alleviate this problem-each documented business process is one more piece of knowledge that doesn't need to be reinvented whenever turnover occurs in your organization.

Processes Make Measurable Quality Possible

Here's a quick theoretical for you: you have a team with two employees assigned to identical tasks. At the end of each day, the outcomes of each employee's tasks are completely different from the others; how do you measure the quality of that team's performance?

If the two outcomes differ by a wide margin, it's almost impossible to measure the quality of your organization's results-it's only possible to measure quality of results when the outcomes are predictably similar, and that's where processes shine. Processes standardize routines and tasks. When organizations have their employees conform to identical processes for business, the outcomes of those routines become predictably similar-this establishes a reasonable baseline by which organizations can reasonably begin to measure quality.

Processes Can Help Identify Operational Inefficiencies

The act of capturing business processes itself has an additional benefit: they help you identify inefficiencies in your operations. If you inspected every major operation in your business and formalized those operations into processes, you'd undoubtedly come across a number of inefficiencies. Correcting those inefficiencies can obviously help to improve the level of output and quality of those procedures, with little additional cost.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to publish four more additional posts that cover all of these individual benefits and how to reap them using business processes-so make sure you subscribe to Working Smarter for more updates.

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Having Trouble Putting a Presentation Together? Try Storyboarding

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Last week (July 23rd) I had the opportunity to guest blog on Dumb Little Man, a terrific personal productivity blog. I wrote an article called "5 Steps to Planning Effective Presentations" and one of the points I covered was the concept of "storyboarding."

What is Storyboarding?

Storyboarding is a simple method for planning the sequence of a presentation. After you determine what you're going to present and what your presentation goals are, use a flowchart to plan how you're going to present that information in order to accomplish your goals.

Here's an example of what a storyboard looks like:

The Benefits of Storyboarding

The benefits of storyboarding are straightforward:

They help you guarantee that the information you present will eventually lead you to your goals.
They help you order the information that you're going to present and they make it easier for you to determine what you're going to say and when you're going to say it.
A storyboard also makes it easy to start planning slides - all of the boxes on the storyboard are going to need to go into the presentation and so all you have to do is figure out how to spread them throughout a PowerPoint presentation.
They save you time by eliminating guesswork.

A quick FYI, I had to give a big marketing proposal a few weeks ago and I ended up with a three-page-long storyboard; the marketing plan I proposed was pretty large and I used a storyboard similar to the one in this example. I personally found it to be very helpful in planning out my PowerPoint presentation (40 slides or so) and I think that taking a few minutes to put together a storyboard will save most people a lot of time.

If I hadn't have made the storyboard I probably would have spent a lot of time editing slides, moving them around, constantly tweaking the presentation in order to make it flow better. Thankfully, my storyboard eliminated all of that guesswork.

How to Do It:

I'm going to use a presentation for unveiling a new marketing plan as an example.

1. Plan Your Presentation's Content Using a Mind Map

If you haven't read my earlier post, "How to Plan Presentations Using Mind Maps," then you should give it a read. It explains why it's a good idea to plan your presentation's content using a mind map.

Once you have your presentation's content and goals figured out then it's much easier to storyboard - you're going to need to know what you're presenting (mind map) before you can start planning how you're going to present it (flowchart.)

2. Lay Out the Primary Topics

Take you "big picture" items and string them out horizontally first - these are your primary topics and you're going to want to use these as the foundation for your storyboard. Here's an example:

3. Start Fleshing Out Individual Topics

Take your initial list of big picture topics and then start fleshing out each one of them individually. In this example I've fleshed out the first two topics.

4. Flesh it Out Until You're Done

Again, here's the image from the beginning of this entry. Just flesh out everything until you reach the end of the line.

Once you're finished with that you're going to want to start building your PowerPoint presentation. I typically give each item on the storyboard its own slides and sometimes multiple slides, but you don't have to do that if you can fit multiple items onto a single slide without "cramming" them in.

Want more information on storyboarding presentations with flowcharts?

Here's some additional information for your consideration:

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Screencast: Storyboarding for More Effective Presentations

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:30:00 GMT

In this screencast Kenneth Roberts shows you how to storyboard a presentation using flowcharts. If you'd like to read our accompanying PDF, "Working Smarter with Presentation Storyboards" then download it here.

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