Born in 1970, sales operations was originally described as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force”.
Sales is moving from paper rolodexes into the world of AI, automation and cloud computing. With it comes more nasty number things than ever before, making operations staff a vital part of the sales team.
Checklists keep us on track and organized. They keep things standardized and controlled.
So where better to employ checklists than amidst the chaos of children?
In this Process Street template pack we’re covering a much requested use case: education.
Thomas R. Hoerr, writing for ASCD, describes how easy it is to imagine incorporating checklists into a whole range of different educational situations:
I can envision checklists that ensure that we have reviewed all aspects of a student’s progress, that teachers have incorporated all of our talking points in their presentations to parents, and that I have spoken to all the relevant stakeholders before I initiate action.
These school checklists cover use cases which apply to teachers, some for administrators, and others which could be useful around a campus.
The 9 checklists below should help users adhere to best practices, create consistency of approach, and document important information for future review.
In a study of 400 businesses in the UK and US, global analyst firm IDC established that 23% of employees don’t understand a core part of their job. Combined with the potential damage that human error can cause, it’s easy to see why it’s important to make sure that your processes are being followed to the letter.
Still, nobody enjoys hearing the term “ensure compliance” when it comes to their team. It’s cold, impersonal, and conjures up images of school students being sent to detention or prisoners under strict watch, and if your team feels the same then their morale will quickly plummet.
Here at Process Street, we’re well versed in the problems with documenting, managing, and deploying your processes. That’s why this post will take care of those compliance problems by giving you some killer tips to make sure your team sticks to their methods without alienating them with harsh policies.
Let’s dive right in!
According to the American Management Association, one-quarter of workers seem to avoid responsibility on the job on average, and 21% of companies believe that the figure is as high as 30-50%. From these stats, it’s clear that low employee accountability is wasting company money on a massive scale.
At the same time, almost two thirds of employees believe their company does not have a strong culture. The link between these two factors is strong, argues management consultant and author Roger Connors. Connors blends The Wizard of Oz with now-influential writings on employee accountability in a series of best-selling leadership books including The Oz Principle and Change the Culture, Change the Game. In the latter, he says:
“Our experience proves that accountability, done the right way, produces greater transparency and openness, enhanced teamwork and trust, effective communication and dialogue, thorough execution and follow-through, sharper clarity, and a tighter focus on results. Accountability should be the strongest thread that runs through the complex fabric of any organization” — Roger Connors, Change the Culture, Change the Game
To paraphrase Connor, a business’ employee accountability depends on leaders creating a transparent culture where responsibility is clear, transparent, and owned. One way to bring clarity to the way your business operates is to use standardized processes and leverage technology that helps track activity, assign tasks, and facilitate hand-offs.
In this article, we’ll go through the links between processes, accountability and company culture, and give you tips on how to improve your business in those areas. But first, let’s look closely at the ties between accountability and culture.
Automation is all the rage right now.
We at Process Street can’t stop going on about it.
Automation can save time and money while taking the monotonous tasks out of your employees’ days.
It’s a win-win.
But, in order to approach automation properly, it’s best to understand the development of automation over time and what best practices are used in order to deliver effective automations in your business.
That’s why this Process Street article will look at the core Toyota principle of Jidoka, including:
It’s one thing to identify errors or weaknesses in your business, but it’s another to actually fix and improve them.
The crucial step in fixing an error is deciding the right solution to implement. Pick the wrong one and you create a different problem.
When you’re in a massive company, you want to make sure you’re picking the right solution before you start implementing across a whole corporate structure.
Because of this, investigating the problem as thoroughly as possible should be paramount. And this leads us to Genchi Genbutsu; part of the Toyota Production System conceptual toolkit.
In this Process Street article we’re going to look at:
As an analyst, you spend your day designing your organization’s processes, measuring their performance and ironing out the fine details. You focus on the “how”. You’re very good at it, but maybe you’re more interested in the “what”? If you want to move past the nitty-gritty of processes and devise end-to-end models and strategies instead, then you’re looking make the leap to business architect.
The necessity of architects is a byproduct of digital transformation.
“There’s a growing need for talented pros who can reduce complexity, establish solid technology processes and ensure tech’s used consistently across business units and functional areas.” — Sharon Florentine, CIO
As a business architect, you will design the structure of the business as a whole by looking broadly at systems design and requirements. Your aim is to improve the business’ operations in line with goals and strategy. Architects do this by theorizing and testing the components of a system (the technology, the flow of work, the deliverables) and overseeing the implementation of the systems by someone in a business analyst role.
If you want to employ approaches like business process management in your business it’s best to have a solid understanding of how these theories work.
One crucial aspect of using these theories correctly is understanding their development.
It’s common for managers to want to employ cutting edge ideas in their business, but without a deep understanding these methods can be misapplied.
These errors will reduce the effectiveness of your process management and hold your business back.
It’s not just business where process improvement efforts are regularly being undermined! In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied the PDSA process improvement methodology in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:
To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.
In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at some of the fundamentals and pick out key historical thinkers whose work we can trace from in order to better inform how process improvement methods should be done. Including:
No process is perfect; there’s always room to improve. Unfortunately, many teams have no way to identify, test, and deploy the changes they make, meaning each tweak is a roll of the dice.
The savings can be massive, but you need a continuous improvement program to make sure that the changes you make won’t make your operations a whole lot harder.
“1 in 10 improvements save money… [each saving, on average,] $31,043 in its first year of implementation.
1 in 4 improvements save time… [each saving, on average,] 270 hours in its first year of implementation.” – KaiNexus, The ROI of Continuous Improvement
Most successful changes will also make your employee’s jobs easier (or more pleasant) to perform. You’ll be saving time and money, but you’ll also be getting far better value out of your current efforts and operations.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the top.
The A-Team Lending is a California-based mortgage broker with over a dozen full-time employees and 20 commissioned salespeople. The A-Team hired process consultant Cary Wan to handle their marketing and improve their business systems
Within the first month Cary has already managed to fully automate a large chunk of their HR systems which would otherwise require them to cover at least $30,000 extra in staffing costs to do manually.
A-Team Lending is rapidly scaling up and adding new salespeople to its team. This level of growth drove the firm to make big changes to the way they approach the onboarding process.
Instead of bogging the new hire down in a stack of forms to scan, sign and print, Cary uses Process Street as a trigger for form automation, allowing both him and his new hires to save hours per week on repetitive data entry.
