As mentioned in a prior blog, smooth operations depend on having the right people in the right roles, with clear expectations and the right processes, tools, and information to do their job. Our consulting engagements normally start out with an assessment of all of these elements of a company’s operations because operational issues often relate to multiple elements. Here’s an example to show how the right tool can support your team.
A recent project involved a full assessment of a rapidly growing company’s operations. The company provides services to multiple stakeholders, and they have several major processes that involve close coordination between multiple departments to meet tight deadlines. These processes aren’t rote; the standard steps have to be adapted each time to the specific situation, due to elements outside the company’s control.
Although the assessment recommendations include process improvements and people-related items like clear roles & responsibilities, I want to focus today on one of the system recommendations. Imagine trying to coordinate a tricky set of tasks for multiple projects with a set of busy people who are all juggling lots of work. To handle that, the team was meeting regularly to run through the list of projects; at the meeting, each person was reporting their status for each project verbally.
Although the meetings did allow for some very useful discussion of certain issues on specific projects, most of the meeting was used to convey routine status information that didn’t need to be discussed. This is a perfect use for a good system: enabling everyone to have access to the latest information on task status without pulling them into a meeting. That way, the meeting time can be reserved to discuss the issues that need everyone’s input, rather than simply providing updates. And whenever a team member needs to know whether a particular task is in progress, or completed, or even stuck, they can check the system instead of reaching out to another team member to ask. How many times have you called someone to ask for information, only to find out they’re at lunch, or even on vacation, so now you have to figure out who’s handling the task and what the status is? Although everyone has the best intentions, it’s an inefficient way to convey routine information.
A good task management system for this situation will provide multiple benefits, saving the team significant time. Here are some of them:
- A standard checklist (a list of tasks, or task template) for each major process to be tracked, that can be copied and customized quickly for each new project
- Lots of useful information about each task, such as:
- The person (or people) assigned to the task
- Expected start date & completion date
- Current status (not yet started, in progress, completed, stuck, etc.)
- Notes or links to relevant information about the task
- Automated notifications: for example, if one person is waiting for another to finish their task, a notification can be sent once the task is marked completed
- Well-designed reports that allow team members to quickly identify and focus on any problems before they stop the flow of the work for everyone
A good system takes the processes already happening and helps make those processes faster, more efficient, and/or more foolproof. In this case, team members were already briefing each other on the status of their tasks and raising issues with each other. The system will make it less time-consuming for them to do that same communication, because they don’t need to find a time to meet in order to update each other on task status, or to email each other about an issue. They all have one place to look to see very quickly what is going on. And with good use of automated notifications, they don’t need to keep asking whether someone’s task is done yet – the system will tell them. That removes a layer of effort for each person – rather than having to reach out for key information, the information is pushed to them at the right time.
A system alone won’t solve all operational problems; it’s a key piece of a smooth operation, but only in concert with good processes, clear roles & responsibilities, and all the other elements of a healthy operation. That’s why an operational assessment should look at the interplay of all of the elements before making recommendations on improvements to people, processes, or systems.
