One of the things that I am always excited to talk about is efficiency optimization. Because in my 15 years of experience driving business strategy and process improvement for corporates across the US and internationally, I have often been a part of companies that were growing insanely fast. One of the companies that I worked with grew from 200 to 800 employees in the span of 2 years. That type of scale is incredible to experience–a lot of change happening. And with it, a lot of processes. Often such massive growth is driven by mergers and acquisitions. So people bring along policies, practices, and processes from their previous businesses, some of which may not scale as well or fit culturally. So as someone who has been in the driver’s seat for a number of large scale business transformations, I’m going to share some of the strategies that have worked for me. My hope is that these insights help you make things efficient while scaling.
Typically you start to see the cracks in your business when you’re scaling up–quickly going from one steady state to another. It’s exciting. But often, things start to drop through the folds. So one thing that I have learned is: You have got to look at your underlying processes and workflows first.
You really have to start there and look at it from the perspective of your client or customer. And then from the perspective of the employees. Go A to Z, what’s that journey?
And it’s important to do this, because candidly, I had an opportunity to work with an amazing company that was just building faster than they could even handle. They had so much demand, and they had to scale up really quickly.
I got brought in to come up with an amazing technology solution that would allow us to deliver in a more efficient, seamless way. They had done a lot of great work to get clear on what problem they were trying to solve and look at different solutions. They figured out use cases and built alignment internally.
My role was to design a customized solution that would meet their needs, and then teach folks how to use it so that we could start to see the gains. But midway I realized, “Oh no! We missed a critical step.”
We needed to have looked at our processes and understood: Are these optimal?
– Where are all the pieces of waste?
– Where are the times when we are doing things over and over again?
– Where are we seeing a lot of human error, ridiculous wait times or downtimes?
You have to start there and try and figure out how to resolve each of those failure points.
And no, JIRA or some other technology cannot fix your workflows for you. Once you get your workflows optimized, you can take it from there.
So that’s one thing I would recommend you start with. It will save you a lot of headaches later on. I hope you found this insight helpful.
I would love to hear from you. What’s been the biggest cause of waste in your experience? And how did you resolve it?
