Let’s talk about cookies and processes 🤤
“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” - W. Edwards Deming
To make chocolate chip cookies you need ingredients and a plan. The ingredients: chocolate chips, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, salt, flour, baking soda, and butter 🤤 Yummm! The plan: do you have all the ingredients? What is the cost of each ingredient? Who is going to make the cookies? How long does it take to make them? Do you have all the tools needed? The list can go on…
Much like the cookie example, you will find that processes are often missing the who, what, when, where, why, and how! Process governance and organization are usually low priority until it is urgent. Processes that are mislabeled, obsolete, redundant, and difficult to find have significant challenges:
Decreases employee capacity from their primary tasks, generating frustration across various workstreams. From a series of interviews I’ve conducted, I found that one employee wastes 10 hours per week on average trying to figure out how processes work and how their roles fit into the puzzle. Those are 10 hours that could be used to actually get the job done.
Increases financial losses due to point #1. The metrics on the 40 processes I’ve captured and developed show that when employees spend time figuring out how to execute their steps, each process is losing as little as half a million dollars (and that isn’t little 💸) and more than $3M per process.
Sets companies back from making scalable changes. When companies don’t have a repertoire of organized and maintained processes, it is harder to visualize where they are and where they want to be. If processes are not maintained as changes happen, they will become obsolete. By the time you decide on the operations of a process, more time will be lost on starting from scratch than proactively analyzing options for optimization.
SO WHAT? Here are a few tips to mitigate the challenges above! And the cookie recipe at the end 🍪
Documentation: KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid! IMHO, there should only be 2 categories of documents: Processes (holds the end-to-end process) and procedures (holds the steps of a process). Why? It makes it easier for users to follow and execute their process. Also, unpopular opinion - when organizing the information in a process document, always put the high-level process at the top and the policies/regulations under it or in a separate document (we can talk about this in a later blog 🙂)
Organizing documents: Building a tracking system can be as simple as using Google Sheets or Excel. Organizing the documents can be done in each column as explained below:
Who: Process owner, roles, stakeholders, and/or the audience processes is intended for, etc
What: Name of process or procedure
When: Cadence of review by dates. This can be automated with notifications with other tools like SmartSheets or ServiceNow
Where: Links to the processes or procedures
Governance: Now that you have your documents organized in Sheets, Excel, or another tool, follow the cadence you set up to go back to your stakeholders and review the end-to-end process with them. I recommend reviewing procedures every 3 months because these change most often. Review processes every 6 months or once a year. Processes should be mature enough (if maintained) to not have changes throughout the year. In addition, governance allows companies to analyze and enhance any (maintained) process a lot faster instead of having to start the capture cycle from scratch.
Going back to W. Edwards Deming’s quote, “If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” The first step to get there is organizing your processes because the key to a company's success is not its individual pieces, but how they are connected!
