But It Worked Earlier?!? Do Your Processes Scale?

I like board games. From simple card games like Euchre to complex ones like Magic the Gathering, I thoroughly enjoy some friendly competition and the structured fun that games can bring. One of the things they print right on the front of the box is the minimum number of players and the maximum number of players. You can mostly make less payers work out, which basically turns any card game into a version of solitaire. Adding additional players however is where things really break down, as games only have so many cards, tokens, play money denominations, and etc. 

I also see a lot of similarities between organizational processes and these type of games. Both have repeatable steps that take us from a start state to a finished state if we just follow the instructions. And just like games, there is a max game size where things start to break down if we are trying to continue playing a game made for 4 with 7 players or a game for 2 with 5 players. We can 'try and make it work' but what happens in most cases is invention of a piecemeal system bolted onto the side of our old set of processes. It can likely limp along, if that is what you want to do.

Knowing when you have crossed that threshold of too many players for the current system to support is tricky, especially when those are completely new employees. Is the process at issue or are the new people just coming up to speed slower than anticipated. Is it a tribal knowledge issue or are you doing something so complex it just takes weeks and weeks to get anyone up to speed fully. Eventually, if it is a process issue something will finally tip the scale and it becomes obvious that a new system is needed. Unfortunately this can happen at the worst times and, in the worse cases, directly affect clients and projects in major ways. 

So how can we prepare ourselves? It starts with understanding what you are doing today. Do you have some form of whiteboard, flow chart, online project management templates or even a slide deck put together about how you get the product out the door? How about how marketing and sales pass leads? How about how engineering and customer support interact? There is a lot to map out in any system, and doing it when you are smaller is much easier than mapping everything later. However, it is easy to bypass this step when there are only 3 or 4 of you working towards the same goal.

Once systems are mapped, can you and all the needed team members explain the workflow? Or are there questions and concerns about some parts? Do any of the parts of the process seem like a 'black box' to anyone on the team?

If you introduce a new project, can you easily insert it into the existing systems or are the gaps that would call out for a new part of the process? This step, while time consuming on the front end, is vital to the growth of a team over time. There is a tendency from a lot of well meaning people to just jump head first into the next shiney project. Those people tend to say thing like "doing that exercise will slow down momentum" or "I can just do those parts you are not getting" or worse yet, "I am too busy to write down the full process. I have too much to do and we need to get this done!" These are clear red flags that something is off somewhere and not everyone is aligned on expectations.

If team members accuse others of being obstructionists for truly trying to clarify the project early on, then how likely is someone going to blame the clients when the results are not as expected. Good management can help people balance their schedules and workloads to avoid the "I'm too busy" issue. Mapping good processes should always seem like something that will speed things up rather than cost momentum. Having a healthy discussion to cover any and all facets of a weeks or months long initiative should allow should take a few hours and it should be an important step to the stakeholders. After all, making adjustments to a whiteboard is much easier, and cheaper, than making emergency swerves down the road.  

If you find yourself ever saying "this was easier when there were fewer of us" then that is a good time to start thinking about mapping and adjusting your processes. Having fewer players does make communication simpler but it also might be masking some underlying issues that won't emerge until another few players are added. Adding more hands will slow a thing down, but as the old saying goes, "if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together". 

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If you want to evolve your processes, I would be happy to talk to you. Reach out today at processdigitalconsulting.com to start the conversation!