Don’t immortalize inefficiencies

Welcome back everyone! It’s been a while since we published our last LinkedIn newsletter, but we are back with a new name [The Process Perspective] and ready to give you the inside scope on everything Process.

Without further ado, here is the first edition of The Process Perspective.

In the first quarter of the year we always have a large influx of inquiries to document processes. It’s a new year, new priorities (or old priorities that didn’t get completed resurfacing) sort of situation.

What we see too often with these inquiries is companies wanting to document their processes just the way they are. What do I mean by that? They don’t want to take the time to go through the process improvement component and simply document their current state.

The problem? What you have been doing for the past 10, 20, 30, sometimes 50+ years is not always (read: almost never) the best way to do things.

In other words, don’t spend money documenting the mess you’re doing right now.

I mean, why immortalize inefficiency? And can you really tell me that what you are doing right now is the most efficient way of doing things if they aren’t documented? In our experience, if you haven’t taken the time to put things on paper (even at a high level) it is almost impossible to improve them, because you don’t know what you are improving.

The process we find works the best:

• Document your current processes at a high level (think workflows and process maps)
• Identify areas for improvement
• Create a plan to implement said improvements
• Document the new process with the implemented improvements
• Roll-out and train the team

Yes, this is a very simplified version and projects like this take time and effort, but in the end you will be much, much better off then if you simply document what you are doing today. That is a step in the right direction, but it won’t take you all the way to where you want to go.

So in 2025, let’s forget mind-numbing “how-to” manuals. Let’s not document mediocrity or immortalize inefficiency. This year, let’s do process right.