EPISODE 5: How do you Design the Solutions for Your Process Improvements?

How to Streamline Your Processes - Episode 5/8

Let's Design the Solutions

In This Episode (5) We will Understand How You Design Solutions for Improving Your Process

In the series so far we have identified the highest priority opportunities for improvement we want to improve and now we are ready for the final piece.

Hi, I’m Rebecca A business operations adviser helping busy business owners win their time back.

Let's get into it.

How Do You Design Solutions?

You Figure Out Solutions by Understanding What Behaviours You Need

A solution is anything that will drive better outcomes in your process. It could be automation, it could be providing people with information, it could be changing their perception.

You figure out what you need by understanding what behaviours you need to drive. Behaviours are how people react to the circumstances, what do they naturally do.

A optimised process is just one where the people and tools react in a way that drives the best outcomes.

There are 3 Root Causes to Misaligned Behaviours

In my experience there are 3 things that drive behaviours

• Perception - people don't understand why, they don't have the context
• Decision - people can't make the correct decision
• Action - people do the wrong thing or aren't aided to do the right thing

A Practical Example

Let's revisit our example from this series and remind ourselves of the three hypothesis:

1. IF we responded faster to emails and booked more calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs
2. IF the sales team cancelled fewer calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs
3. IF the sales team didn't spend time on unqualified calls THEN they could spend more time on value-add

IF we responded faster to emails and booked more calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs

We want to talk about the IF part of the statement. What is driving that? When we think about perception, decision or action what is causing us not to respond to emails fast enough?

Once you have discussed it let's say the reasons are

Perception - The team doesn't understand why they are setting up the calls

Decision - The team doesn't understand who has what responsibility in the team and so aren't deciding how to handle each email efficiently.

IF the sales team cancelled fewer calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs

Let's say here the root causes are:

Perception - the sales team thought that when they declined the calls they just moved to another sales person they didn't realise they got cancelled all together

Action - the inbox monitors can't see the sales teams' inboxes so are just guessing when to schedule them and bumping into a lot of clashes.

You would go through each of your hypothesis and work out what is driving the IF statement - or rather what is hindering the IF statement being true.

Designing the Solutions

99% of the time just understanding the root causes designs the solutions by itself.

From our example we need to ensure the email monitors understand why and define what their roles are and the agreed protocols. For our second hypothesis we need to give access to the sales teams calendars and define a protocol for cancelled calls. Easy peasy.

We Have Optimised Our Processes

It's as easy as that, we have optimised our processes.

Still to Come

In the last 3 issues of this letter we will look at ensuring we track process; how to document your processes and how to get your team to stay on board.

See you Next Thursday

Next week tracking progress.