I Thought You Said This Was Difficult: Getting Started with Process Improvements

When the idea of updating a department’s processes is broached, first reactions typically fall into one of two buckets. 

1. Help! I don’t know where to start! 

2. That’s too big a project! We’re too busy to take the time to make ourselves less busy. 

   
   

The good news is that the same OKR structure that focuses your team’s attention on a company’s top down objectives can also be applied to these very localized performance improvement initiatives.  You can access the same four OKR superpowers (OKRs and their Super Powers) on items at a micro level to ensure success.  

Super Power	How it Helps With Process Improvements
Focus and Commit to Priorities	Where are our biggest pain points, and which should we tackle first?
Align and Connect for Teamwork	The pain may be concentrated on one role, but the solution may require coordination across the team
Track for Accountability	Define timetables for success; complete the goal; move to the next
Stretch for Amazing	Sometimes little wins are enough, but take the time to imagine the “perfect workflow” - how close to that can you get?

This article will largely focus on our first superpower: Focus and Commit to Priorities.  To make the improvements you want to see, set a framework to easily figure out which workflows merit the most immediate attention to smooth out the bumpy points in your team’s regular activities, including.  As a group, you need to: 

• Brainstorm

• Document

• Prioritize

• Rinse & Repeat

Brainstorm your Pain Points

Different areas of the organization run into obstacles that clog up their workday, cause an unnecessary amount of errors or stress, and prevent employees from spending their time efficiently.  On my teams, we call this class of obstacles “pain points.” 

The concept of process improvements isn’t to immediately work miracles and magically automate an entire department overnight.  It’s to identify, prioritize, and clear these obstacles one at a time so the team can incrementally start spending its time on more interesting and valuable tasks.  

We have classified our pain points into one of three categories: 

1. Team driven suggestions

2. Weak points revealed by KPIs

3. Bottlenecks identified by formal workflow mapping.  

Team Driven Suggestions - Normalize Complaining

Your department staff will know first when there’s a pain point that needs to be addressed.  They’re living through the extra steps, the manual work, and the cross-linked Excel sheets every day.  

The challenge you may run into, though, is that most of the time, people are very polite.  Many of your team members aren’t going to gripe about things (at least not to you), especially if they perceive them to be little personal friction points that would be dwarfed by broader company responsibilities. 

Step 1 - Prioritize Trust.  

If your team trusts you, they’re more likely to be honest about their challenges.  

I am a big proponent of the framework of Trust defined by Frances Frei and Anne Morris in their book Unleashed.  PIck that up if you haven’t already. But if you’re going to start tomorrow and need the Cliff Notes, check out Professor Frei’s Ted Talk on rebuilding trust.  While you can’t solve for trust overnight, understanding these principles immediately, and identifying where you fall short as a leader, allows you to take steps to rebuild trust with your team as early as your next conversation.  

Step 2 - Give Permission to Complain.  

Your goal in step 2 isn’t to problem solve.  It’s to let people just get some things off their chest.  Like Frank Costanza during Festivus, everyone needs to just air their grievances.  If your team trusts you, and you ask them to tell you what they hate about their day to day work, you’ll highlight pain points very quickly. 

Two suggestions to optimize this exercise.  

(1) At this stage, solutions aren’t the goal.  You need to fill your bucket with potential pain points.  Don’t put a kink in the hose by asking the team to solve them at the same time.  You’ll get fewer ideas this way.  You’ll maximize your list and your chance to drive real change by getting as many thoughts down as you can.  

(2) You have to ask ALL of the members of the department for feedback.  This list shouldn’t be populated just by you, or your department managers.  The voices of the entire team need to be not just welcomed, but required.  If you find that some team members haven’t contributed anything to the list, please return to Step 1 and try again. 

KPIs - Road Signs to Areas Needing Attention

Before tackling process improvements, you should have built at least a draft of the metrics which tell you what good looks like.  If not, take a pause, and check out my prior post on the subject (KPI Construction Zone).  

I’ve always liked the quote “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”  I think Maya Angelou had something far more impactful in mind than department KPIs, but the mindset remains the same.  If you are reviewing your KPIs regularly, and you notice that a metric is underperforming relative to its defined target, believe what it’s showing you - that’s the place that needs your attention. 

If you are reviewing these on a regular basis with your team, they might be way ahead of you, and are using these KPIs to identify areas for improvement without further prompting. 

Remember - the KPIs aren’t just there to populate a dashboard - they’re there to help you know what to do next. 

Process Mapping - Break Out your Whiteboard Skills

Oftentimes you or your team will know something is wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on what is gumming up the works.  When this happens, digging in deeper may lead to a breakthrough.  Diagram each step of a specific process from the beginning to the end, involving all of the team members who are involved in this activity.  As you progress through the process, be sure to explicitly ask the types of questions that might jostle free a few ideas and drop some additional pain points onto your list. 

• Is this step easy or hard? 

• How much time does this take you relative to other steps? 

• If you were on vacation for a week, could someone else easily fill in for you? 

A quick note on process mapping in a hybrid environment.  I’m a fairly big proponent of remote and hybrid work.  That said, I still find this works the best when you get everyone in an office, sitting around a white board, where different people can stand up with a marker and add their own notes and details.  It encourages a more free flowing exchange of ideas, and often commands the team’s attention better than using a variety of online white boarding tools. 

That said, if handling this remote is your only viable option, I would recommend taking special care to engage quieter members (just because someone isn’t saying much doesn’t mean their insight isn’t viral to unlocking a key step), and take the breaks required to have everyone’s undivided attention for the entire exercise. 

If you’re stuck on how to get started with process mapping, check out Tom Wujec’s TedTalk and website DrawToast.com.  It’s easily digestible and short enough that you could ask your entire team to watch the full video as part of your process.  It was introduced at our company several years ago by our CEO, and became one of my go-tos when helping new employees understand this process. 

Document…

Remember.  The goal of this exercise isn’t to solve all your problems at once.  The goal is to decide what to do first that will help your de   partment operate more efficiently.  

To select the best pain points to resolve first, utilize this very simple template to document and prioritize your opportunities (Download it in the Resource Section!)  

We ask team members to self populate this list; suggestions don’t have to be vetted or endorsed by a manager to be included.  Instead, individuals simply add a row with any pain point they feel justifies consideration.  

This template includes a handful of classification data that we find useful.  While you can customize to include additional fields that are appropriate for your team (see the instructions for additional suggestions), I would strongly recommend always including the following four:  

Data Field	How to Use
Pain Point	Provide a brief (one to two phrases) description of what the issue would be.  Examples from our accounting department could be:  Too much paper in the AP process Complication from using multiple payroll vendors  Errors caused when recording certain operating expenses; no visibility to trends
Type of Pain	Describe the impact of these problems.  Asking team members to think of pain points in these terms often unearths some additional challenges Error prone Not scalable I just hate doing this
Ease to Fix	How hard would it be to fix this? Can it be handled with existing tools, or are new investments or vendors required?  How fast can change be implemented? Easy Medium Difficult
Magnitude of Issue	How big of a problem is this pain point causing? Large Medium Small

… and Prioritize

Your desired outcome should be to identify at least one, but no more than two pain points to address in a period.  Just because there are five items that merit attention doesn’t mean your team should tackle five at once.  Remember the superpower - Focus and Commit to Priorities.   Select one or two projects, address them as quickly as possible so your team gets the benefit from the process change, and then move to the next item on your list. 

Selecting which pain point to resolve first requires a quick and dirty exercise to estimate the return on investment (typically, your time). In other words - identify the largest problem you can fix by using the least amount of effort.  

Starting with the complete list, gather the entire team (either in person or remotely) for the following prioritization exercise. 

1. Filter your list - start with everything identified as “Easy to Fix.” 

2. Rank each item on your list by the magnitude of issues, from largest to smallest.  

3. Evaluate each item classified as “Easy / Large” and “Easy / Medium” and try to align where to start.  That’s where you’ll get the biggest benefit from your time. 

Since you’re working with relative values, take this opportunity to discuss and verify the assumptions made when populating the list.  Some clarifying questions to ask the submitting team member and discuss as a group: 

• How were assumptions on size and ease of solution made? 

• Do you think the solutions are achievable without new tools or investments? 

• Who else is being impacted by that pain point? 

• If you fix one problem now, does it make it easier or harder to fix the next one later? 

Process Improvements are your Secret Morale Booster

In addition to fixing previously unidentified problems, elevating your staff member’s priority to be your priority is a valuable tool to driving employee engagement.  My experience is that these projects often target an opportunity to improve or eliminate some of the most dreaded or tedious day-to-day tasks; exactly the type of monotonous work that causes your valued team member to start looking for another job.  

By focusing on a priority, aligning all of the required resources to this goal, and tracking progress along the way, you can turn a department weakness into a strength, often deploying your team on more interesting and valuable tasks, or providing better service and execution for your customers.  

Rinse and Repeat

With some regularity (we aimed for quarterly, but no less frequently than twice per year), refresh your Pain Point list.  Re-evaluate the problems already identified, and add new ones as required.  The needs of your team will evolve, and you’ll often find that solving one problem actually resolves others, or maybe identifies new easy issues to fix that you hadn’t even thought of before.  

Your Turn

As you embark on this exercise, I reiterate one of my favorite cliches - don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.  

You definitely won’t fix everything at once.  And it’s possible that the elegant solution to resolve some pain point becomes a little clunkier than you anticipated.

That’s OK.  You need to build as complete of a list of issues as you can before you can even think about figuring out which one to fix.  And you need to include your team and offer them a little structure to build the most useful list.  

So as you undertake this exercise, don’t let anxiety over perfectly maximizing your team’s ROI cause delays.  While the top of your priority list will be driven by a little bit of qualitative judgment instead of purely objective calculations, you can have confidence that adhering to this approach will have you spending your and your team’s time in a productive way.