Minimum Viable Processes & Systems

Second part of the exercise. Has anyone heard this idea of mvs? I talk about minimum viable systems. So mvs.

We talk about critical client flow in the systemology book. That's the starting point. It answers the question, what are the first 10, 15 systems that you should document? And then some people think, oh, when I get to there, I'm done. But the actual inflection point, the bit where systems really takes hold in the business, is what we call minimum viable systems. That's where systems touch every department in the business. And what we want to do is think of your business as one big system and the departments are the subsystems in that bigger system. And if any subsystem is underperforming, it'll drag the health down the biggest system that is your business. So we need to make sure that each department is firing. So along that same line of thinking, then we start to think, well, what is the purpose of each department and what would need to happen in this department for this department to be considered a success? So what is the job of the marketing department generating leads? What is the job of the sales department converting those leads into clients? What is the job of the HR or the management? And we go through this idea of thinking about your business in these chunks and what is the purpose? And if the HR department failed, what is it that it has failed to do? That means it isn't a success, which means it's bringing down the overall health of the business. And if we can identify what are the critical 10 systems in each department, that then becomes a great starting point for what should we be documenting specific to these departments. And that for me, it's almost like the second milestone. The first milestone is to get your critical client flow documented and dialled in. The second milestone is reaching minimum viable systems, where the systems reach all departments of the business. Everybody in some way is affected or will be touched by one of those documented systems so they can experience the effects of a system and what it looks like and what a good example looks like. So we work towards minimum viable systems. That's also typically when the system's culture takes over. I was chatting with Chai briefly and she said, oh yes, we've kind of gone through this process where we did the critical client flow and we introduced it to the team and we documented it and then we got that process and then we started linking it together in our project management platform. And we wanted to make sure that all of the tasks then had links to process. And then it's almost like this iterative process and Then you start to move into other departments and there's a point at which the team goes, ah, this is how we do things here. And it takes a few goes. It's that first hump that you have to get over. Just putting a system or two in place is not enough and doesn't mean the team members are necessarily going to follow it. You've got to push through this, get to the point of minimum viable systems where we start to get those key systems in place. So the exercise that we're going to do to identify your core systems, it's this one here. So it's the six departments to systemize and I've broken it into the different departments if you want to scribble some of them out, if yours are named different, maybe your marketing is called lead generation or I don't know, whatever you want to call your departments. But this is, you know, applies to most businesses. You're going to have to generate leads, you're going to have to sell them, you're going to have to invoice them and collect cash and do things hr, where you're probably going to have to recruit and onboard team members and maybe there's some performance management in there, operations, you have to deliver your core product or service and then management, there might be certain meetings or some rhythm or business operating system that you follow for your business to work. So using this, I want you to think with your business. There's a couple ways you can think about this sometimes to spark your thinking, think about marketing and go, what happens on a daily basis? What happens on a weekly basis? What happens on a monthly basis, what happens on a quarterly basis, what happens on an annual basis. And you think in terms of marketing and you might go, well, marketing. Every day we do a post on social media. Okay, I'm going to write that down. And again, we're looking for the essential few. We don't have to capture everything. But if you were to say for marketing to be a success, it would need to get these activities done and it would have to be consistent. And you're looking for the recurring activities. So not once off type activities. We're talking about what are the things that happen every single week? Well, or every month. Once a month we create a marketing report that gets fed through to the leadership team and we look at how the marketing department has performed. Okay, well that's a monthly recurring task that you might determine is really important for marketing to achieve that outcome, which is to generate more leads for your business. And you just go through and you do the exercise. There's also this sheet here that's floating around. I interviewed.

Department experts on each different department and I asked them, if you were to pick the most critical systems in each department, what would they be? So I interviewed them and then I took the transcript, fed it into ChatGPT and I said, ChatGPT, can you read the transcript and pull out for me what you think are the essential systems and any that you think might be missing? And then we generalized it. So here. So these are a range of different things. This is not, you know, this is guided by me interviewing a marketing expert, which was Alan Dibb. This was me interviewing the sales expert, which was Jack Daly, which was me interviewing. So each one of these, there was an expert behind the help me to determine what those are. So the exercise now is you can use this as a prompter, you can look at this, but you can think in terms of your own business. Because the ideal thing is what are you currently doing, not what you would like to be doing. Let's capture what's currently being done and just think through your business in terms of the systems that make up each of the departments. Does anyone have any questions? Is that reasonably clear? Clear as mud, yep. All right, well, we'll might spend maybe a little bit longer on this one. I'll go five to 10 minutes. We probably won't get to do the share component, but we might share at the end as a group to go. Okay, well, what stood out for you? Where are you getting stuck? Anything like that, you can stick your hand up.

How do we go with that exercise? This is one thing that I suggest you come back to. It's really helpful to think of your business through this lens and do it with your team, particularly department heads. So meet with your marketing department head and go through this exercise.

Meet with each department head and work with them to identify what the critical systems are. Then looping in your systems and AI champion, you would then have them start to work with department heads and team members to extract and document those. And then if you needed help to go a little bit quicker, you end up working with a systemologist and then they can help kind of speed up the process.

I hope you enjoyed that clip. Just a heads up. It was a snippet taken from the Business Systems Accelerator program, which is the world's first training for systems champions to help you build a systems driven organization. If you'd like to find out more about the program, head over to systemology.com bsd say and I'll see you in the next video.