Processes are the Duct Tape of Productivity

His interest in her had begun months before in a Florida library. Taking a book off the shelf he found himself intrigued, not with the words of the book, but with the notes penciled in the margin. In the front of the book, he discovered the previous owner’s name: Miss Bridget Melville. He located her address, and they began sending each other letters. He was soon shipped overseas for service in World War II. During the next year and a half, the two grew to know each other through the mail. A romance was budding. The soldier requested a photograph, but she refused. She felt that if he really cared, it wouldn’t matter what she looked like. When the day finally came for him to return from Europe, they scheduled their first meeting. “You’ll recognize me,” she wrote, “by the red rose I’ll be wearing on my lapel.” He arrived and looked for a girl whose heart he loved, but whose face he’d never seen. Then he saw Bridget Melville. Bridget was a considerably overweight woman well past 40, who had graying hair tucked under a worn hat. He did not hesitate; he went to the rose-bearing woman. He said, “Hello, you must be Bridget. I am so glad we could meet; may I take you to dinner?” “I don’t know what this is about, son,” she answered, “but a gorgeous young blonde begged me to wear this rose on my coat. And she said if a man in uniform were to ask me out to dinner, I should tell him that she is waiting for you in the restaurant across the street. She said it was some kind of test.” That day Lieutenant Craig Thomas met his true love and for the right reasons.

We create tests, processes, and procedures for all sorts of purposes throughout life. Some might be to vet a potential date, another to guard your passwords, and in the business world, some processes can put your impact on steroids.

Map the best route

Nonessential bureaucracy is the enemy of efficiency. Accomplishing a project—whether it’s fundraising, selling a widget, or building a website—needs a clear, direct pathway. It would help if you can visualize the steps taken from concept to completion as a street map. You want a single, direct road from A to Z with stoplights along the route for key stakeholders to do their part. Often though, many company’s productivity map isn’t one straight line, it zig-zags. Plans get delayed because the road awkwardly curves and swerves for no logical reason; you need to go West for one thing, and then double back to past where you started in the East for another. Instead of it being an hour's drive, it’s a three-hour road trip because the course wasn’t planned better. A simple exercise is to think back on a recent project and ask yourself where things slowed down. Who is the person or process that caused the straight path to get sidetracked and the project needlessly got lost for much longer than it should have? Figure out those sticking points, and you’ll be able to grease your track for far greater speed.

If you’re responsible for operations (or just have a voice that will be heard), you’re like a city’s architect. You must mastermind how you want to build your productivity roadmap. Do you want it to look like the streets of New York, complex but efficient and clear, or confusing and scattered, where a journey takes longer, like Tunis? Efficiency and infrastructure are all about quality and speed with as little waste as possible. The faster you can get a thing done with excellence, the more complete focus and time you can invest into the next big thing, and the more big things done in a period of time, the quicker you grow.

Think practically

If your business is fabrication, where are the slowdowns? Is each machining workstation close to the next, like an assembly line, or are they randomly spread out with seemingly no rhyme or reason? You can shave off time and save energy by putting them in order of their steps. How hard is it to find a part? Is everything clearly shelved and labeled for a quick grab, perhaps barcoded for inventory, or does your team lose hours a month as amateur archaeologists trying to dig up the right piece? The same goes for digitally weighted companies. Beyond having an e-commerce store, how prepared are you for living in a digital age? What do your servers look like? Do you backup large files that are rarely touched on tape or by some others means to save the high cost of server space? How strong are your preventative measures? Is your firewall current, along with your enterprise virus software? What’s your contingency plan if your company’s files were ever infected with ransomware and you couldn’t access your drives ever again without paying up in one way or another? Are you tracking plans on notepads and emails or are you are using tools to streamline your process? (If you haven’t considered team productivity software, it can be a major help, and there are plenty of options, like Slack, Scrum, Asana, Basecamp, Monday, even Google docs, or a host of others that can streamline your workflow and internal communications.) Is your quality inconsistent? Create a checklist of what to look for in a stellar product—symmetry, correct grammar, etc. and get someone skilled in those areas to sign-off on each product before it goes into production (if you're not a large company or don't have someone gifted on hand, you could hire a freelancer for this stage).

It takes a village to raise an idea

Depending on your company culture, you may have a take-charge, inventive CEO who dreams up most of your big ideas, you may have a think tank, it might be a free for all. However you roll, you need a strong support infrastructure. A brilliant idea is normally like an uncut diamond; you can tell it’s valuable, but there are a whole lot of rough edges that need to be shaved off and polished before it's useful. One simple idea is to start a steering team. Assemble a choice pick of your leadership to vet big ideas before you leap into production. Some companies launch products like a child builds Lego towers: quickly and without much thought. You could radically improve the future of your company by bouncing ideas off a team for initial feedback. They can speak into its potential appeal to the public, the overlooked details, the adjustments that could be made to greatly increase its value, coordinate a test group, and countless other fundamentals to maximize growth. It takes time but it produces results. Some companies stay afloat due to a few ideas that work but invest their resources into trying out a million that won’t. They tie up time and capital into launching new products to market that would have been executed in a steering meeting. Skipping team reviews and jumping to project assignments can be a recipe for long-term disaster. Our biggest hindrance to growth will always be ourselves. The wiser we become the better we set our companies up for success.

Creating wise processes and sticking to them is like going on a diet. No one wants to, but in the end, we sure become healthier for the discipline.

[Street map: https://geoffboeing.com/2017/01/square-mile-street-network-visualization]