When I am reviewing or designing processes, I’m always looking for the three E’s. And you should to.
Are your processes efficient?
Are they effective?
Are they exciting?
Efficiency refers to the time it takes to achieve an outcome. Is the way that you are currently doing things in your business the most productive and with minimum wasted effort?
Are your processes successful in producing the required outcome? Does the process lead you straight to the outcome or does it lead you off in different directions?
Do your processes make you excited to want to use them? Or are they causing frustration, more questions than answers, or do they make you want to skip using them and just do it another way.
The three E’s all have one thing in common. They are designed to streamline the way that you and your team work.
So when reviewing your processes, consider the following questions.
- Where do your customers get frustrated?
- Where do you or your team get frustrated?
- Which of the steps creates a bottleneck (waiting on someone else or another process before it can be completed)?
- Where do costs go up and down?
- Which of these steps requires the most time or causes the most delays?
- Are any of the steps repeating themselves?
- Do you have access to technology that can help with reducing the number of steps or the time taken to do each step?
Explore how you can eliminate any problems you have identified and then design (or redesign) a process based off this new information.
Then test, test and test again.
Things will not often work perfectly the first time around, so after the new process has been rolled out, closely monitor how things are going in the weeks and even months after to ensure that it is meeting expectations.
