Continuous Process Improvements: 5 Steps to Doing More with Less
The phrase, “Do more with less” reverberates in corporate halls these days, as companies try to reduce costs while growing revenues. You would be forgiven for thinking, “How? By some form of economic alchemy?”
The good news is that you can achieve both goals if you use the concept of Continuous Process Improvements. The idea can be applied to the entire company, but for a moment lets focus on you.
5 Easy Steps
You apply the concept of a continuously improving process to your workday in 5 steps:
- Think
- Plan
- Do
- Measure
- Repeat
Your Typical Day
Think of your typical workday. Your alarm wakes you, you get ready, go to work, and then, depending on your job, perform a series of activities which all have inputs (emails, phone calls, reports, briefs, scheduled events, etc), employ methods to do the work (rules or procedures which you follow), and produce outputs (your work effort results like reports, sales opportunities, leads generated, etc.). Then you go home, get some sleep and repeat.
Now take each aspect of your day that you believe should/could be optimized, and spend a few minutes doing the first 2 steps.
Think about the task itself. Although it may seem a little chicken-and-eggish at first, start by questioning the methods you use to complete it. Many times you’ll find that you do something the way you do because you inherited the method or learned it from someone else. That approach may no longer be ideal given new technologies, structural changes in the company, and so on. When you’ve examined every method involved in this task, ask: “What are the inputs (what do I need to use this method)?” Are they always to hand? Where do they come from? Could the rate at which they arrive be changed? Do the same for the outputs. Lastly, think about the metrics you will use to measure success for this task (hint: it’s probably units of work). If you’re a sales person it might be more sales. In marketing? Perhaps more leads. A writer would measure words or chunks like chapters, etc.
Now you can plan what to do about your answers to the questions. Pick a method which your answers indicated could be improved upon and plan what to do to change it. The change you are contemplating may require that you change what you use to do the task (inputs), so that you can change the way you do it (methods), and you may even decide to change what you produce (outputs) as a result. Think this through in terms of the activities upstream and downstream of this task, because each method in the chain has its inputs and some of these may by one of your outputs.
Continue with steps the next three steps: Do, Measure and Repeat. When you measure and find you’ve done more work, repeat by going back to questioning it all over again (think and plan) so that you can start the cycle all over again. And get better and better as time goes by.
If your measurement shows that the change you made is less productive, try something else (although when that happens, you should really put things back to the way they were before this last change).
It’s not rocket science, but it does take discipline and dedication to the cause. And it really does work. How can I be so confident? As I stated upfront, you can apply these ideas to a company. Much as we’ve developed a process for inbound marketing automation, we run Gossamar the company as a Process too. We are measurably getting better at everything we do as a result. Our clients see our service getting faster, more comprehensive and with fewer errors. We see it this way, too, of course. But we also appreciate that it gets less expensive to provide, enabling us to grow revenues while reducing expenses. Literally, to do more with less.
5 photo by Yaniv Golan. Thinker by Brian Siewiorek. Repeat by Thomas Hawk. Licensed under CC.
