Identifying Areas of Improvement

(1538 words/6.5-minute read)

Everyone wants to do more, especially when the direction feels like “doing more with less.” But focusing on the wrong thing can lead to even worse waste than already happening.  And this happens when desired outcomes are not realistically scoped to current situation analysis. So how do you know where to start and what you should (and should not!) be focusing on?  Know it always goes back to good questions.

Understand What You Do

It is hard to improve anything that you do not understand. You need to first take inventory of what you do today. Now your challenge, though, is not to describe what you THINK is happening. You need to take a hard look and SEE what actions are actually happening. Take for example your customer service team. Your organizational mission and vision focus on treating the customer like family. Yet, when you walk around the customer service team to hear their conversations with the customers, you hear less about their relationships and hear more rustling of papers. You see that each team member has their own paper files to track a customer and what they prefer and all the details on the relationship. When you are open and honest that you hired team members to support and connect with your customers and see that all you have right now are paper organizers and researchers, you can see the disconnect. But that is a good thing as you have just identified an area ripe for improvement.

Once you know the focus area, now you start going into the good questions. This is where we try to find out what processes are occurring. Questions like:

• What activities are you doing for your customer?
• What do you have to prepare to meet with a customer?
• What activities do you have to do after you meet with the customer?

Don’t be afraid to do some LBWA – leadership by walking around. Literally walk around and watch your teams if possible so that you can get a true image of what is actually happening.

Understanding What THEY Do

Now of course, we want to ask the WHY question. But as leaders, be careful not to judge or jump in here. You want to know why the person doing the activity thinks it is valuable. One of the simplest ways to get some immediate process improvement is to help clarify and communicate information. People may not know why they do an activity. Just understanding the reasoning behind an activity can help them refocus on better outcomes. Of course, an activity with no reason at all to justify it is a great place to just remove that task and shift focus to value-adding activities.

Some questions you can then ask to help facilitate this understanding would include things like:

• What takes most of your time away from helping customers?
  • Why do you think that is?
• What areas or tasks that you are spending the better part of your day on?
  • Why do you think that is so?
• What other work activities do you not have time for?
  • What is blocking you from doing these? And why?
• What areas do you struggle to complete your work? Service the customer? Feel engaged and excited in your work?
  • Why do you think this is so?

Now once you know WHAT the work is actually happening, and hopefully clarified some why, then you want to ask the HOW, WHERE, WHEN questions. Now this is the details, the analysis work. Again, stay unbiased and just try to capture what is actually happening.  It’s best to just write things down that you see.  Factual.  Not good or bad, just facts.  THEN sit down with the team members and simply state one process you saw.

Then ask the person to explain that to you.  This is where the meat of the conversation can come in.  Listen to what the person describes is happening.  Objectively compare that to what you observed.  This is often the first insight as people feel they do more than what may be happening or fail to see how incredible a job they are doing with what they already have.  Notice how what you saw compares with what they think they do.

Then you can ask them – since they are the process experts from doing it day in and day out – what do they think SHOULD be happening.  The people closest to the processes normally have the best insight and ideas.  Listen openly.  No need to promise anything at this time.  Simply gather input and ideas to take back now that you have a clearer picture of what is and is not happening or could be happening.

Looking for the Process Improvement

Now consider that the biggest ROI of any effort comes from a process where it is repeated daily by multiple people. Those processes are the ones that are not only great for process improvements, but then they also have the volume to justify investments, including technology.

 Consider identifying:

• Processes that are performed by all staff
• Daily processes and activities that have to happen to run the business
• Processes and activities that are done multiple times a day
• Entry level tasks that need little training
• Work that follows a checklist, same steps every time

Areas where process improvement can be most impactful to

• Activities that take people away from their core functions
  • e., a customer service representative who spends more time documenting their calls with clients than doing the actually phone call with a client
• Manual steps and record keeping
  • Include printing and mailing of physical items
• Tracking of calendars, tasks, and resources
  • These are great targets for technology integration

While everyone is excited to improve processes, spending time and effort on work that is only done once every 10 years may not be the most efficient use of your time.  Knowing about processes and how often they are performed and by whom can help you get the justification for your efforts better when there is a clear ROI.  The greater the impact, the easier it is to justify pulling resources away from other work to engage in the process improvement activities.

Metrics that Add Up

Process improvements do not have to be a massive upgrade or system overhaul.  Process improvements can be little tweaks to daily activities.  In our process improvement activities, we demonstrate how to do some value stream mapping.  This is where you look at the activities to complete a task and you consider the value of each step towards the goal.  Concepts of Lean and removing wait times are discussed to find small adjustments that could save serious employee time. In these measurements perhaps we save 10 seconds a day.  Most people would not quantify that as much.  But what if that process was performed 6 times a day (so 60 seconds savings).  Then we found out 3 people do that process daily (so 60 x 3 X 240 average working days a year).  If we can save 10 seconds off of every time that process is performed, then we save the company 12 hours a year.  What could you do if you had an extra day and a half every year to do some more work?  Little changes can add up to big impacts, but you have to know where to look.

Go Back to Great Questions

Process improvement efforts can have the most impact when they are done on processes that can return the greatest ROI.  It’s not about the biggest process or most profitable customer process.  It is about finding those processes that are done so often that small changes or even additions of technology can drive the time and cost savings so that the most valuable activities have more time.  Think back to those customer service agents.  What could they be doing on those phone calls if they were not having to organize their notes.  Sure a customer relationship management (CRM) system can be daunting and expensive to get training and custom configurations done; however, knowing the context of your customer service agents, could you get greater sales and longer lasting customer relationships if your customer service agents could focus on the customers?  In some companies that is worth an insanely amount of money.  The price of a lifetime customer often outweighs the day-to-day expenses.  However, we have to find the details of those daily activities to free up the space to be customer focused. What processes have you learned your teams are doing that could be ripe and ready for some effective and immediately value-adding process improvement?

Now is your chance to simply ask some great questions. Seek out understanding, not justifications or judgments.  Seek insight into what is and is not happening.  And seek information and insight from those who are performing processes day after day.  A few simple questions could give you the needed ideas on how to get yours and your staff’s time back!

Interested in exploring how to do some of these process improvements?  Reach out to us today for more information on collaborating with a collaboration chat here - we’d love to find ways to collaborate and deliver even more value in all you do!