Be Passionately
Curious

ELIMINATE WASTE.

Process documentation is not about reducing headcount, rather unnecessary time spent on anything the client would not want to pay for.

When you identify manual steps that can be automated or any time spent on a task you can shorten or eliminate, your costs are reduced, creating the opportunity to be more competitive and profitable. It also provides the opportunity for your people to perform higher-valued tasks, whether that be innovation, sales, customer service, or whatever else can help strengthen the company and maintain employee engagement.

What to do:

1. Gather a team that delivers something on a regular basis. They can have involvement in a stage of the process or be involved in some way from beginning to end with a final deliverable for the client.
2. Ignoring any opportunities for improvement, we want to start off by documenting the current state: how things are done today. Have people as a group identify all the tasks and write each on a sticky note.
3. Once you can’t think of any other tasks, put them in the order they are performed, and isolate each group of tasks for each process.
4. Place each stack side by side from the beginning of the process on the left to the end of the process on the right. If you have not done this already, give each stack a name to represent each grouping of tasks.
5. Review to make sure nothing was missed and it covers everything that you do as of the current state.
6. Identify who contributes and how long each task you have on a sticky note takes in combined hours (your load time) and how many days it takes from start to finish of just that task in days (your cycle time).
7. Add up your load and cycle times for each task group and sum for the entire process.
8. Now build out the future state: start by deciding if any of the tasks do not add value, by considering whether or not your client would want to pay for it. If so, remove these tasks from the process.
9. Change the sequence if there is a better order to avoid rework, or steps that might have been missing to prevent rework. Rework is any time spent on something to fix an issue that could have been prevented, or doing something more than once because it does not meet standards the first time, every time. Identify whether you can change the number of people and how something is done to reduce the total combined time needed to complete each task and deliverable in the process.
10. Determine the new load and cycle times of each task, task group, and total process. Determine how many hours/dollars have been saved, how much capacity has been freed up, and the reduced number of days to deliver.
11. Decide if you want to decrease selling price to improve competitiveness or keep the new increased margins to strengthen the company.