How to Streamline Agency Operations & Take the Chaos Out of Project Management

Foreign. Hey, it's gray here from Zenpilot and I want to take a minute to share with you the 1, 3, 5 formula that teams should be using to streamline their operations. And these weird numbers all mean something, so I'm going to take you through them one at a time here. The first thing we need to start with is what's our goal? And our goal is to create clarity for everyone. We've had a chance to work with over 2,700 teams over the past nine plus years. And the way that people express the challenges they're facing with their operations. When you dig and ask the five whys and keep going deeper and peel back the onion, you find out most of this leads back to a lack of clarity. And so what we're trying to create is we're trying to create clarity at a leadership level around the key metrics of the business, at a managerial or departmental level around the performance of their set of clients or their team. And at an individual contributor layer, we're trying to create clarity for those folks on what is on their plate on a day to day basis and exactly how that needs to get done and what is the definition of done. So the first thing to understand is what's the goal that we're shooting for and what does that clarity look like. And once we've defined that goal, the way that we're going to get that, the way that you're going to truly streamline operations is always a combination of three key components. And those three keys to create clarity are the tools that you're using, the processes that you follow, and the habits that you build and the way that you execute in the day to day. To be excellent as a, as an entire organization and operation, we need to have technical excellence, we need to have procedural excellence, and we need to have behavioral excellence. And those are the three key pillars. If you have the tools set up correctly, you've got the right tooling in place, everything's super efficient, and you've got the right processes, you've got the best system in the world. But if the habits aren't there to execute on that, it's all for nothing. And if you've got the tools right and you've got the habits right, you're producing and you're producing efficiently. But if the processes that you're following aren't right, the outcomes aren't going to deliver the output that is ultimately needed. And then obviously if you've got processes right and habits, this is probably the best combination, candidly. But it's going to be really inefficient at delivering. So we need to have all three of those pieces. And the way that we get there is through the five steps. And so those five steps should look like this. First we're going to design, then we're going to build, we're going to train our team, we're going to launch, and then we're going to optimize over time. And when the system's built the right way, that optimization step, the system should be somewhat self correcting. It's giving you a feedback loop in and of itself in the system to help you get better and better week over week, month over month as you move. This is what our process looks like to do that when we're working with a team at Zenpilot. But I think this should apply to pretty much any team. And really this goes beyond just implementing a project management platform and processes and training the team or plugging in a specific fill in the blank software. This is really about how most integrations should operate. So in the first step at the design phase, we're trying to have everybody get to a point of clarity where when we close our eyes, we envision what the solution looks like to take us from where we are today and we have clarity around our current performance to what gold standard looks like in the future for how to operate this business, that everybody closes their eyes and sees the same picture. At the end of the day, here's what we're shooting for. So now we can take and we can distribute out who's doing what and we can still come to the right outcome. This is like the architect who's designing that mansion before you go start building it. That design has to include all three key areas. So the behavioral standards, what are the habits we're going to have, what are the processes, what's the, how are we going to get to procedural excellence? And then technically, what does that technical blueprint need to look like to create world class tooling? You move from there into building. So that's building out the actual tooling and the processes and making you know, your tooling is not a single tool. There's always going to be some combination of tools in the tech stack. And so how do those talk to each other at the train phase? So we've kind of gotten the technical part mostly built, we've gotten the processes built and then we need to train the team on the behaviors and habits that they need to build to be successful. And so that starts with really crystal clear rules of engagement and then it's going to come down to how you communicate that and empower your team to go follow through on what that looks like. And then you're into launching, holding people accountable as you build healthy habits and then optimizing where you're looking at your performance and you're continuing to make better decisions based on real life data that you have. So that's a quick summary of the 1, 3, 5 formula. This is something that we teach the teams that we work with and lead them through. If you have any questions, I'd love to hear them.