The Scenario
Here’s a familiar scenario that is playing out in a small business or company department near you. Right now.
Karen, the operations manager, is hovering in Tony’s Teams chat and wants hourly updates about when her request will be fulfilled. Tony is the project manager.
“Why is this taking so long? We have to get these requests out faster!”, types Karen, adding a smiley emoji to smooth out the appearance of frustration. “I asked for an hourly update 3 hours ago”, she adds. As if Tony is not completely aware of the urgency.
Tony does not respond immediately. The process is the process. It is inefficient, ineffective, and costs too much time and money every month to run through it. Everyone in the small company knows it. But, to try to dig in to fix it has not gained traction the last several times it was raised in the monthly status meetings.
Everyone involved in the process is working as fast and as hard as they can.
But Karen still wants her reports on time.
The Problem
Tony knows the process for getting the reports out but is not quite sure how to improve the delivery time. Too many tasks and too many people are involved in the process.
In short, abysmal results AND over-consumption of resources are slowing the business down in a myriad of ways.
Greater efficiency is needed to drive better results and use less time, effort, and resources.
Karen needs to advocate for a project to identify and fix the problem the right way instead of continuing to push the same result.
Any small business or company department that can dig into this problem and achieve results in the form of continuous improvement is on the way to higher productivity and higher profitability. Something every business needs!
The Approach (or The Plan)
Before you start trying to improve, you need to understand the problem much better! This takes time and lots of questions, conversations, and collaboration.
*** Are there too many steps? Or are they redundant?
*** How are decisions made?
*** What and how is information communicated? Right people? On time?
Understand the problem by asking the right questions and analyzing the responses within the framework of plotting a course to continuous improvement.
Operational inefficiencies will always be there. It is the price we all must pay for the rapid pace of business and life as it evolves around us.
The better we understand the problem and know that it will always be changing – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – the more prepared we will be to pivot and meet the challenges.
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