Whether you like it or not or know it or know, your business is a system.. Your business is made up of lots of moving parts, steps that form processes, with multiple processes that feed into the overall system of business.
And if you’re too busy to build good working systems in your business, you will always be too busy..
Many of my clients don’t realise how much power they actually have when it comes to business performance, both internally and externally and it’s only when we start mapping out their core processes they start to see it and more importantly, believe it..
See the goal of any business system or operation is to move product and service through as fast as possible without compromising quality or taking shortcuts. That sounds relatively straight forward until other processes and areas get involved. I call these blockers and the typical offenders include
- IT Systems
- Quality Assurance
- Sign offs (and approvers nowhere to be seen)
- Finance
- Contradictory KPIs
- etc….
You can probably add a few more to this list and please do as these compromise the flow and anything that compromises flow costs you LOTS of your hard earned cash – both in profits and cashflow! So the more you understand what blockers you have, the more you can do something about them. And you can!!
I see blockers as opportunities to improve, turning it from something that usually contradicts the flow to something that complements the flow.
Holding workshops to remove these blockers, with cross functional teams involved, will deliver exceptional improvements for your business and to your clients too. The benefits are visual on multiple levels
- Creates strong cross communication with key stakeholders
- Different areas get to appreciate what happens outside of their area
- They then understand what they do can have consequences down stream, for good or bad
- They visualise that they are part of a supply chain as opposed to just being siloed in their own area
- Most importantly.. they begin to help each other
