In my last blog I listed the six steps to writing a successful process, you can read that blog here. In this blog I provide a case study to show how I used these six steps to make transform a department, improving client communication, client delivery times and revenue all at once.
What’s the purpose of the process? – To facilitate delivery of client projects, understand team workload, ensure quality and on time delivery of all projects. The purpose doesn't need to be detailed but knowing what you want to achieve is important.
What is the problem? No one person understood all the projects that were happening, when they were due and which team member needed to complete them.
This led to team stress when being asked to work on too many things at once. Delays when projects were required to be amended because the quality was not good enough. And unrealistic deadlines being given to clients because the team didn’t have capacity to complete the work at the time suggested.
Start with what you have and adapt. There was already a system in place to handle certain tasks. Replicating that system to cover all the projects meant that everything could be tracked. There was one list of all the projects with all the deadlines and a team member responsible for each item. As each project progressed the list could be amended to reflect new deadlines and when each item was completed it could be clearly marked as done. Seeing who had which tasks and when, prevented unrealistic deadlines being set and allowed enough time for each task to be completed to a good quality removing work being redone later.
Testing small. When you are faced with a complicated process that isn’t working it can be easy to try and fix many issues all at once. This rarely works, if you change too many parts of the process at once you can’t understand which element has caused the improvement, or perhaps not had the benefits you were hoping for. Start with either the most urgent issue or the one that will have the biggest impact. In this instance I decided that the client communication was the most urgent. When clients knew what was happening on their project and when it would be finished they trusted the work would be done. This reduced admin, allowing more time to focus on moving projects forward.
Next we tried working on a smaller number of projects at one time. That meant we could discuss these projects in detail and get them moving forward quickly and in big jumps rather than everything moving slowly. When a project had progressed to the next stage a new project would be added to the list and briefed in detail before the work commenced. Communication of what the client could expect and when was added and delivering to those timescales soon became easier.
Train and train again. We’ve got to the point where we have a process that works and clients are getting their projects completed. Sharing the way this works and how everyone can contribute to the success of the these projects meant training. Starting with why we needed the process, how it worked and how it would be improved by everyone working together. We held an initial training session and then several session where overall training on the subject was completed as well as questions and answer sessions to deal with direct queries from the team.
Measure success. When the project started there was no way to measure success. No data was available to understand how long projects took and if they were delivred on time. That meant measuring the success of the changes being made wasn't easy.
Within a few weeks, I set up some basic metrics to monitor performance. Knowing these could be refined as the process was improved while allowing me to see the new process was working (or not). They also provided an early warning for when something went wrong because rather than improving the measures got worse.
While improved revenue is not always the purpose of a process, it can sometimes be one of the results. In this instance it was easier to see how long tasks took, which tasks were included in the price of a project and which were extras. As quality and communication improved as a part of the process delivery times reduced and the team had more time to focus on doing paid work instead of all the admin.
If you’ve got a process that isn’t working for your team. Why not give me a call to discuss how to improve it.