4 Tactics to Fix Your Workflow with Process Strategy

Everything you do or you have ever done before, you've established some kind of workflow for doing it. Whether it's the workflow of frantically googling things or the workflow of having a concrete plan of action, the way you make work happen is your work flow. But just because you have a workflow doesn't mean it's the perfect one. In fact, the whole process world that I live in here at ProcessDriven is all around finding ways that your process could, could be better. Either more fun, more efficient, more whatever it is that matters to you. But when it comes to this space of process improvement and improving your workflow, it's really more art than science in a lot of ways, because there is a whole array of tools you can use. Tactics for taking the workflow and making it different or better. But the right one's going to differ depending on your exact situation. So in this quick video, I'm going to break down four tactics you can apply to just about any process to make your workflow a, a little bit smoother, a little bit more efficient. So we're going to get started with our first tactic, which is something I'm calling backups. All backups refers to is having a backup of things. I know, how fancy you never would have fathomed that. But even though it sounds like a simple concept, I promise when you actually apply it, it can have some pretty powerful implications. So to bring it to life, let me actually show you an example here on the whiteboard. Let's say we have this process for creating images that go on our YouTube videos. These thumbnail images go through a process to be created, and a pretty normal flow for them is what you see up here on the whiteboard. This process by itself is not bad. But if we want to apply the backup strategy, the backup process tactic here, what we want to look at is where do we have opportunity to add seconds in command in this particular process? There are two different examples that come to mind. The very first one is in the actual design step. And this really goes for any creative step, but for this design step, if I have only one designer, and that designer is out on vacation, sick, leaves the team, whatever, when that happens, not if, when we will have our entire workflow come to a grinding halt very suddenly, we won't have any additional coverage. And so one thing I can do in terms of backups right off the bat is have a secondary person who is primed and ready to go for that given task. In this case, we're talking about backup people, someone who's cross trained and who can cover in on that responsibility in the event of someone being out for a vacation. Now, with something like answering the phone, having a backup just like I described here could be perfect. But with something like design, where there's some technical and subjective skill involved, we may need to go a step further to make sure our backup is really a seamless one. In this case, what we might do is every time there's a new thumbnail to design, we randomly allocate it between the two designers so each designer is getting a proportion of the work so that in the end, our normal design style reflects two designers. And so if one of them's out on vacation, it's pretty natural to have the other design style come in because they've already kind of become one. In the normal day to day, whether you split that 80, 20, 90, 10 or 50, 50 between multiple designers, if you have the budget for it. Redundancy in people is a great way to go about this. Now, beyond just redundancy and people, there's also an option to incorporate backups in this actual process itself. In this case, what we're going to be thinking about is steps in the process. Right here we have a pretty normal flow. In fact, maybe a little bit better than normal because it has drafting and it has revisions baked in. Now, by itself, having a revisions process where somebody else reviews the thumbnail is a form of a backup. But if this was a very important process for us and we didn't want to have a typo in that thumbnail or so on and so forth, we. We could expand these backups by incorporating additional checkpoints where additional fresh eyes are coming in just to check over the work for things that really, really matter. For example, maybe we really don't want to have a typo in our thumbnail, or maybe we do want a typo in our thumbnail because it gets more attention. Whatever our strategy, we want to ensure that it comes to life. So, for example, we might have the designer create it, we might have a second person review it, we might have the designer review it again before it goes out. Whatever cadence we want to have, the more checkpoints, the more backups, the more people who could potentially catch a human error, and the more resilient our process is. And that backups, my friend, is our first tactic. Now let me just wipe all this away here and let's go on to our second process tactic, which is what I'm going to call little decisions. Little decisions is referring to areas in your workflow where things need to be handled, a problem comes up, something, something unpredictable, something that requires a decision. For most workflows, when you're first getting started, all decisions are going through one person because one person is figuring it out. But as you start to delegate or use automations, or try to standardize or try to hire four different workflows, if that singular decision point does not change, your workflow can become very stressful and very slow and very inefficient. So what this tactic is all about is finding the decisions that are small enough to, to kind of push down the organization to allow people to make independently. For example, let's pretend we have a process here for resolving a customer support ticket. This process outlines how we would receive a ticket, review a ticket, and then respond to that ticket. Now, by itself, there's nothing wrong with this process, but if every time we reach a decision point, we need to check in with the CEO of the company, which I know for me, when I first started support tickets, this is what was happening. That's a problem that can be very, very tiring when you scale up and have 10, 30, 300 support tickets like we talked about in this video. So what can we do here? Well, we've got two options. One, we can outline more of the process, break things down in more detail, so that way things don't need to have a human decision at all. For example, if someone asks for a refund and our terms are no refunds, then we can just say, no refunds. There's not a decision that needs to happen there. But in case that's not possible, our second option is to delegate decision making up to a point. For example, in the support process, we might implement a policy that says if a customer support decision is worth less than $200, a support rep can make that decision independently. That means the support rep has the discretion to decide whether or not they want to make a refund of a $40 purchase. If it's not clear in your process already. Over time, the goal would be to raise that threshold of when things need to get escalated for outside decision making from $100 to $200 to $1,000 to $10,000. Until ultimately your team is acting entirely autonomously. And as a quick little pro tip around this one here, the higher skilled your staff is, the higher you can make this threshold. So if you're hiring brand new, fresh out of college, people who are just figuring out how to work, let alone how to work at your company, you probably won't be able to give them as much Discretion. As if you take those same people, train them for years and years and then give them this discretion, the threshold and autonomy you can provide is going to be a direct reflection of the experience level and competence level of your actual front end team. So in this case, making sure you're investing in training and hiring the right people and not just trying to train everybody up, which we've all done, is going to make your life a lot easier here. Now let me just wipe that away. We've got two more tips for you here, but before I go into them, a quick word from your sponsor, which is me. Now, before we move on, I want to say a quick thank you to our sponsor of today's video, me. Yeah, I hope that's not weird. I'm sponsoring my own video and I wanted to speak to you briefly about the program we have here at ProcessDriven where we actually work with folks like yourself to organize their business processes. So if you are operating a lean or a small team or even just yourself with some contractors and you're looking to organize your operations so that things are very streamlined, so systemized, documented, so that way when you go on vacation, the business can continue to operate without you and you have this clear sense of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and how you can make sure everything is working properly without a lot of stress, then I would really encourage you to check out our program that's linked in the description below called Process Driven Foundations. Foundations is a combination of coaching and learning through videos. Kind of like this one here on YouTube where we're going through step by step, how you can build out a systemized organization by building structures in your work management software and then building a culture to actually incorporate process into your day to day. So if you would like to work with myself or the team here at ProcessDriven to make sure that your organization is systemized and again, calm, that's the key thing. Check out the link in the description below where you can find out more about our foundations program and even watch my signature training, the Blueprint, where I go over our overall process building strategy, which you just might find interesting either way. With that, thank you to our sponsor again, me and back to the video. All right, so we are back with our third process tip. This one I'm going to call Just in time, because that's what it's called. You might have also heard it referred to as pull systems or make to demand models. Essentially all this tactic is is doing the thing you actually need in this moment versus just preparing for something that may never come. That's probably not the most succinct way to say it, but you get the idea. Now, I imagine, you know, process gurus out there are probably thinking this is a little bit too simplified, but I want you to resonate with this concep and see how it can come to life in your own workflow. So we're going to keep it simple. Let's go to this example here. This is our workflow for picking orders for our E commerce store to make our lives really easy. When we first started delegating this process, our workflow just involved somebody coming in every day and preparing 15 boxes of our signature product and then leaving for the day because we didn't really know what they needed to do and we wanted it to be easy to track. So we just said, hey, John, make 15 boxes, then you're good. This kind of model of doing this workflow is the opposite of the tactic we're talking about here. This is doing in anticipation ahead of time, just doing it consistently, regardless of what demand is. What we want to do is now flip this process on its head a little bit. And rather than preparing, because we should prepare, because we should prepare, because we might need to prepare, instead we want to shift this process so we're only preparing what we actually need for the period in time. And in all other moments, we're going to use our time on just the things that matter for that day. So here's the revised workflow. John comes into the office, and rather than just picking 15 boxes, John has a task to check the orders that came in that day. If there are 15 orders, he proceeds with packing 15 boxes. No big deal. But if there are not 15 orders, he he just produces as many boxes as are needed and then spends the rest of his day doing something else. Whatever else you define. Maybe that's preparing FAQ documents, maybe it's creating social media posts, maybe it's cleaning the shop floor, I don't know. But we want to make sure that we're only spending our time on things that we know have value. In today's moment, all of this just boils down to just in time, the name of the tactic. Do things when you need to do them. And that's about it. If you do things when they need to be done, you will by definition be productive, as opposed to just doing things because they're on a checkbox. For more about this concept of productivity and how this whole strategy can apply to a personal level, check out this video. On here when I go through whether or not I am actually productive. But let's wipe all this away now and move on to our last tactic for process, which is what I'm going to call parallel processing. I don't know. I say it, I'm going to call it that. It's.