How to reduce business insanity

Customers experience your company's processes, not its functions. Yet executives spend most of their time focused on making sure the functions of the firm ie HR, IT, etc are properly led, staffed, and driven by appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs).

For the sake of customers and the sanity of your team, it's important to turn your company on its side and focus on those processes that flow across your various functions. This is a critical activity in building a sustainable and profitable growth firm — and building a firm that isn't driving everyone increasingly insane as the company gets bigger.

It's poorly designed and executed processes that suck up large amounts of money, time, and energy and ultimately lead to a frustrating employee and customer experience.

There are normally four to nine of these horizontal processes that cut across your various functions, processes like "how do we bring on a new customer" which can involve sales, operations, IT, and even finance.

And like with functions, they must be properly led, staffed, and driven by appropriate KPIs and they must be designed with the end customer in mind.

So the first step is to gather your executive team and name these processes. While several of the processes are similar across many companies there are some that are specific to your firm.

Accountability

For instance, GrupoIntercom, the internet incubator I'm working with in Barcelona, has a special process for attracting and selecting entrepreneurs to join the incubator. They also have a specific process for helping an internet entrepreneur go from concept to monetising their internet portal. We identified eight key processes that drive this incubator. What are yours?

The next step is assigning accountability for each process to a specific leader. Their job is to monitor the process, let the team know if there are any issues, and lead a regular meeting to fix or improve the particular process. As such, it's best if the person with process accountability has some cross-functional experience.

So, who are your key process owners? It's as critical of a decision as who heads up each function in the business.

This leads to the third step mapping the process. Gather together someone from every function that touches a specific process, including a few customers that are impacted by the process (if possible). Using coloured Post-It Notes to represent each function (sales is green, accounting is blue, etc), map out the steps and decision points as the process presently flows. Then step back and begin streamlining the processes, eliminating wasteful steps and removing obstacles.

Along the way, set specific KPIs at critical steps and decision points so the process can be continuously monitored. I'm a particular fan of the Lean approach to process mapping and improvement, visit www.lean.org for more details.

The beauty of identifying and documenting the processes in your business is that it provides you wiith an excellent "how to" manual. Last, it's useful to revisit and examine one process every 90 days as part of your quarterly planning process. Like hallway closets and garages, these processes get junked up and need to be re-cleaned periodically.

The writer is author of ‘Mastering the Rockefeller Habits', founder and CEO of Gazelles Inc, an outsourced corporate university with a faculty of top business experts. It is represented in the Middle East by Dubai-based biz-ability.