How do I identify what systems & processes we need?

I’ve written previously about the difference between a system and a process. At the highest level, systems take inputs and do something with them to create outputs. Processes are the something. I’ve also written about how defining your S&Ps can benefit your organization. And honestly, it’s not the defining itself that’s valuable. It’s that de-fining is a pre-requisite to re-fining.

You can’t improve your 5k time if you don’t know how fast you ran your last one.

So, how do you identify the systems and processes you should define? The good part is that it’s not hard at all. The less good part is that most people aren’t great at doing this for themselves because they’re both (1) experts at their work and (2) too close to take an objective view.

The approach involves:

• Looking at your work from an outsider’s perspective
  • What essential top-level tasks are your team, org, or department trying to achieve?
  • Go one level deeper: What are the inputs and expected outputs within each of those buckets? With what regularity do these things occur (daily, weekly, quarterly, etc.)?
• Look at the list you’ve generated. Think about the ROI for improving how your team executes these items. Consider how often you do these things and the impact of them being done poorly (or excellently!). Some will only occur once a year but be highly influential to your organization’s success. Others might happen daily and be very low risk but be so voluminous that they’re worth addressing. Pick one or two to focus on first.
• For each of those, what steps does an individual or team take to change the inputs into outputs? Does everyone follow the same steps, or is there variation? How do you know those steps are being completed each time? Does that even matter? What level of experience is necessary to complete these steps? Would that remain the same if they were better documented?

Yes, you’re trying to identify what systems and processes latently exist, but the ultimate goal is identifying the ones that drive business value. There’s no sense in defining a thing that has little impact on your org’s goals.

Once you’re through this exercise, you should know what systems and processes are worth defining. To be clear, you’re already doing these things — they’re just not standardized. Once these are defined, you can start figuring out how to refine them. That’s where the fundamental changes start to accrue…and a topic we’ll cover later!