BusinessForward

By: Ryan Mulvaney, Solutions Architect, BusinessForward

On a road trip home from a customer, a new team member shared that she was feeling overwhelmed by her workload.

“I am equally excited by all of these initiatives and they are all equally important but I realized that I am over-scheduled to produce multiple things in the same week,” she said with more than a little worry in her voice. Because I often see this issue when working with clients, I was happy to talk her off the ledge.

What could she change to lessen her stress and ensure she delivered quality work? In her case it turned out that she was using self-imposed deadlines to drive her output. The more we talked it through, the clearer it became that some deliverables where not time-sensitive and that others were being slowed down because too many people were involved in getting to the end result.

While the term “work smarter not harder” seems cliché, it was definitely applicable here. A few tweaks to organize her work flow and simplify processes where she could, uncovered more time than she realized she had. I am happy to say my colleague reports that she no longer feels overwhelmed.

Maybe this is a very basic example, but it illustrates the point that working smarter is more than a catch-phrase.  As a leader, you may have heard your higher producers declare this is how they achieve their goals. But what does it mean exactly, especially when you are in the midst of a complex project with multiple team members on both sides of table?

DIY Solutions

There are plenty of techniques available that will help to nurture and improve productivity. You can implement management operating reports that help you to keep your finger on the pulse of the organization and identify areas that might need your intervention. You can implement incentive programs designed to encourage and motivate your team.

The problem with methods like these are that they only address issues at the individual level and do not address fundamental problems with the process. They also force your team members to individually develop new and better ways of doing things, rather than as a team. Often, people will just work longer hours in order to meet the goals, changing nothing about their processes or the way they operate.

There is a way to ensure that your team increases productivity by following a consistent and efficient process, which does not require excessive monitoring by you. This management practice is known as Workflow Optimization and has two parts.

Workflow Optimization

The first part is an optimal design. Simply put, it is the point in which you maximize your productivity in the most efficient way, which will minimize your costs.

The second part is to put some control around your new process to ensure that people do not deviate from it. This may require some technology investment, but the investment is a smart one. Tools like workflow engines and process automation can provide a lot of value in process consistency.

Optimal Design 101

Designing an ideal process is going to be your biggest challenge. At a high level, your goal is to remove any waste and delays.

Waste is any vacant effort, things like re-work (or having to do something over) and low or no value added activity. This includes:

• Printing and scanning a document that could have been saved to pdf
• Creating a report that is rarely/never used
• Running or printing a report for operational numbers that can be found in a system or dashboard

Sometimes people just do things because that is the way they have always been done. If a process was never properly designed and documented than it is probably a mix of a few different people’s inefficient processes. People rarely question the value of what they do, they just do what they have always done. Low/No value activity is the consequence of that.

Delays include anything that increases the cycle time. It could be a bottleneck in the process. When one area gets so busy that they do not have the capacity to push the work through to the remaining stages and process participants.

It can also be an issue with what we call critical path where the process gets held up by an individual or area that, for some reason, is not responsive.

These types of inefficiencies should be analyzed for a root cause and eliminated or altered in some way. Often these inefficiencies are hard to recognize and even harder to fix, but a critical eye in this stage of the process is invaluable. It can come from an internal improvement team or an external partnership with a sharp, process-focused consulting team.

Making it Stick

Once you have an optimal process designed, you are going to have to implement the changes and most importantly, make sure that those changes stick. The easiest way to make sure that people are doing what you want them to do, when you want them to do it and how you want them to do it is to put some technology around it. And it doesn’t mean going out and spending millions of dollars.

In this case I am talking about process automation tools and workflow engines. Tools that can help speed the process up by alerting participants when they should be fulfilling their responsibility. Tools that provide all of the detail that one might need to execute a function. Tools that make sure that the participants follow whatever process is programmed into it.

These can range from stand-alone process automation workflows to simple end user computing tools like Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft SharePoint. While stand-alone systems are robust and feature rich, they are also more expensive. You can accomplish a lot of the value of Workflow Optimization with the collaboration tools inside of SharePoint or by writing rules and configuring MS Outlook.

Workflow optimization is something that works in a range of situations. From “widget producing” or in transactional environments for functions like accounts payable and accounts receivable as well as production lines and assembly lines. It can also be very effective in service organizations.

Our team recently helped an IT organization better serve their customer base through workflow optimization. We started by taking each of the services they offer and redesigned them to be as optimal as possible. We then programmed each of these new service offerings (or workflows) into their IT Help Desk ticketing system using a process automation tool. The result was a 20% increase in productivity by this IT Help Desk and a lot less stress for their team.

The old adage that admitting you have a problem is the first step couldn’t be truer here. It’s perfectly ok to recognize there must be a better way of doing things. As my colleague learned and as our customers see every day, processes can change and work days can be a lot brighter.

Ryan Mulvaney is a Solutions Architect with BusinessForward. He has helped companies around the world solve problems with a smile. Send Ryan an email at rmulvaney@businessforward.com and share your workflow issues.