By Michael Thomas, Sr. Digital Product Manager
Consumers wield more power over businesses than ever before. Companies are waking up to the fact that competing on price and cutting costs is no longer enough to win customer loyalty. This has created new pressure to produce highly targeted, curated and personalized products, while getting them to market faster. To get the most creative value out of workers, many businesses are looking again toward technology to optimize operational workflows. Software providers have long promised magic solutions that offer “continuous improvement” for processes, but how can you really know if any of these solutions are worth the investment and will work for your company?
Craftsmen will tell you that each tool in their toolbox has a purpose, with many designed for specific uses. Through the process of creating a product, craftsmen wield each tool with techniques acquired through experience. You cannot sell a carpenter a tool that you say will meet all of their needs — they simply won’t believe it. Experience supports this skepticism. All too often large technology purchase decisions are made prior to understanding root process issues inside the workplace and in existing workflows. No software solution will drive optimization of your workflows and uncover these operational issues! Companies must first gain clarity on current processes and how humans really perform them.
Here are 3 tips to help you acquire this knowledge:
1. Find out how your employees actually perform their jobs.
Managers are always familiar with everyone’s job titles. Some of these folks may have even written the job descriptions for those they lead. However, they may not understand how these talented people perform their jobs on a day-to-day basis, or how they have changed them in reaction to new business requirements. What kind of tools do they use? What kind of tools have they crafted themselves to get their jobs done? How close is this to how you, as a business manager, imagined their jobs would or should be? Can you see clearly how their specific actions tie to achievement of company financial goals?
2. Discover how communication really flows within your organization.
When we suspect that silos have formed in our organizations, our first reaction might be to attempt to force down walls and drive collaboration. These reactions, while well intentioned, don’t always magically fix the intrinsic problems that caused these silos to form in the first place. Find out, on an individual level, how employees communicate with each other to accomplish tasks. Are there talented members of your team who want to — and can do — more? Are there other members of your team who covet control? Does this assure quality, or create unnecessary bottlenecks? Taking the time to listen and learn from team members at all levels of the supply chain is the best way to understand how things really work in your business.
3. Know how team members would adjust their jobs to make workflows run more smoothly.
Everyone’s heard the adage that the solution to problems may be just under your nose. Organizations can often diagnose workflow problems by involving the people who drive them. Often, these folks have the best skills to identify pain points, implement work-arounds for problems that arise during production, and eliminate necessary steps in a workflow.
Once you’ve mastered the truth about your existing processes and workflows, you will be in a much better position to understand which operational KPIs you need to measure to track progress against business goals. Only then can you properly match the needs of your business against the feature sets of any workflow optimization solution in the marketplace. You will be a more informed buyer, and can better select the new tools your organization really needs to drive financial results, instead of purchasing what others want to sell you.