David Jenyns walks participants through identifying mission-critical systems for each department. Using marketing as an example, Michael lists five existing systems: social media, partner networks, website content management, customer referrals, and Google Analytics. The exercise focuses on documenting current systems and classifying tasks by cadence, from daily to annual.
Questions this video answers
Aim for no more than 7 systems per department (stretch to 10 at most).
What we'll work on now is we'll actually work on this exercise. This was the link that I'd given everybody to be able to download. And if you want to print that out or just have a sheet of paper for each of your different departments, we'll go through the exercise to identify the mission critical systems like the critical client flow. I'm going to give you some rules. Firstly, you need to think what is the purpose of this department? And that will help you narrow your focus. Much like the critical client flow, we say ah, what is the primary target audience and the primary product or service? And we're looking for the most probable path. The reason we do that is it strips away so many other things. We could be systemized and gets very focused. Similarly, you want to focus laser focused on what is the purpose of this particular department. The other rule I'm going to give you is let's not have more than 7 systems per department. Look at a stretch, maybe 10 at the most but really let's aim for 7 systems per department. And the other rules at the moment are only capture what you're currently doing, not what you would like to be doing. Part of this exercise will help you to uncover areas of very clear weakness and holes in your business. So first start off just capturing what you're currently doing and you then also, as you go through one of the ways, a thinking tool to help you uncover what systems are relevant in each department. You can use the triggered daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual. Triggered is what tasks happen when they happen. Like someone makes an order that triggers something daily happens on a certain cadence. The rest of them are obviously quite obvious because you've got the cadence. So the first test will be we'll go through and write this all out once we get all the way through. The second test will go one by one and make sure everybody can say to Da woomka. So make sure that you start practicing that also because that's part of today's test. So we'll start off with the marketing department and we're just going to spend a few minutes on each department and James will have some hold music. But we'll start off what is the role of the marketing department? And you can feel free to type that into the chat for me. What is the role of the marketing department? An easy one to start with. Generate leads. Perfect. So if that's that particular subsystems purpose, then the systems that we think about need to help in achieving that particular goal. As I said, you can either use the worksheet or a one pager. And I want you to think through, you can use the. To the. And let's list 7 to 10 systems. I would like to perhaps get someone to do a little bit of a share. I know Michael's already stuck his hand up in the volunteering inside circle for the first one. So I think we can kick off there and then just be mindful, I'd love for someone at the end of each of these to share what they worked on so we can start with Michael. And it's just a quick little share because there's only seven to 10 systems that you're going to be sharing and some things to take away as you go through this exercise. If you can't come up with something that also gives you a little bit of insight maybe to your level of understanding of what's required for that particular department. Now that might mean you can chat with your department head or other team members or finding out a consultant or an expert to help you develop out particular departments. If you do struggle, I'll give you some templates and some other things that can work on to speed this up. But maybe just to start, Michael, I know you're wanting to work on developing your marketing department so yeah, perhaps you can share where you're at at the moment.
Yeah, this is definitely an area where definitely feel overwhelmed. It's an area of the business where we don't have an expert, we don't have that person that's naturally a marketing whiz. So I stumbled when you said what we do have in place, not what we'd like to have in place. I've got a pretty long list of what we'd like to have in place at the moment. Doing social media. So we've got social media system if you like. We've got a big network and I suppose you might call that partner relationship management system where we, we share leads to them, they share leads to us, we share market intel. So that's just a really big industry network that we've just known these people for years and we get probably the majority of our business that way. But that's obviously not very scalable. We've got, I've got here content management system and that's in relation to our website because we're. We're working on projects, completing projects quite regularly. We always have some really nice photos, some project shots that we need to update the website. So we've got a system in place to make sure that we've got all the latest and greatest info on our website. We recently implemented a customer referral program and another one is Google Analytics. I suppose that's what we've got in place at the moment.
Yeah, yeah, good. So a couple of key takeaways for everyone there. Imagine, because I talked about to the wooomka, imagine this now at some point transferring over into your project management platform and each one of those things that Michael mentioned there becoming a documented system or process. It'll help you X out certain things where you might say Google Analytics, it depends is the task that you identify as critical. I want to review Google Analytics once a month and get key insights and take actions based on that. Or when you say Google Analytics, are you thinking installing Google Analytics, which is probably a once off task and may not end up having a system. So it's not to answer the question, but rather for everybody else to think as they document here, this won't end up becoming a to do list, this will become a to system list. So we're thinking about what are the things that will potentially be really recurring and sometimes thinking in the period as well. So Michael mentioned some things like social media and you might go, okay, social media could fall underneath daily. Because I want to have someone who looks at social media daily or who does look at social media daily. And these are the actions that they are currently taking. So the first step and Michael rightly identified, it's very easy to slip into. Here are all of the things that I would like to do and like to get into place. But much like the critical client flow that will come and I'll actually give you some things to help fill in some gaps. But the first step is to figure out what you've got. Some other ones I would suggest that you add into that mix. Michael and everybody else as a bit of a primer for some of the other departments would be thinking around the systems around effectively either accountability or reporting or how you're setting your rocks and KPIs and things like that. So one of the tasks that might appear in your marketing is every 90 days we pick out what are the things we're going to be working on for the next quarter. And that might be something that would fall underneath quarterly and maybe monthly. You mentioned Google Analytics, maybe that's where the reporting comes into it. Once a month you've got someone who generates a report and then once a month we're reviewing that and we're pulling action items from that. And you can do that in just about all of the different departments. You need to think in terms of how can you look at where you currently are and where you want to get to, and then how can you effectively pull out the things that you're going to work on for the next 90 days for that particular department? And that's really the same for every department. Just a heads up. That clip was taken from a session in our Systems Champion Certification program, which is the world's first and only program for systems champions to help you build a systems culture and develop an AI first approach and roll it out inside your organization. To find out more, head over to systemology.com systemschamp and I'll see you in there.
