Having the right Systems – Standardizing for performance

In most growing businesses, the major routine cause of hectic activity and the consequent less than proportionate return on effort is a complete lack of process standardization. Most common refrain is that my products/service is highly customized, each customer needs to be dealt with individually and processes cannot be standardized. The reality is that every business can have standardized processes, major parts are standardized and last mile delivery could be customized. Take the example of a Cardiac Surgeon – can his process be standardized? It can be argued that each cardiac surgery is different, and therefore how can any standardization be possible. But a careful review will show you that preoperative and post operative processes have many common elements which an efficient support team can execute. The specialist cardiac surgeon walks on to the operating table and spends just the time to do his specialized job and walks away leaving the beginning and last portions of the operation to be done by the others in his team. By doing so the specialist cardiac surgeon conserves his energies to do more operations per day. In the similar way, we must look hard at our delivery processes to achieve maximum standardization of all processes leading to customer delight and this must encompass the post delivery services too.

Following the standardization of processes, one must define roles of persons to execute the well demarcated parts of the processes and also define the competencies needed to efficiently perform them. Thus the 4 key elements to improve process efficiency are – standardization, role definitions, competency definitions and fitting the right person for the right role. This business process organization is a very important aspect of breaking the phantom ceiling effect.

The blog that follows this one will highlight the critical aspects to consider while staffing, in order to help small businesses become big ones.

Photo Courtesy: Paul, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Visit www.mapcerebri.com

To get the full picture please see the following links –

The Phantom Ceiling Effect

How do you recognize the phantom ceiling effect?

Breaking through the Phantom Ceiling

Review your Revenue Model

Structure-System-Staff and the Role of the Chief Entrepreneurial Officer

Reviewing structure to optimize performance of a small business

Reviewing Structure to optimize performance of a small business

In most small organizations wanting to grow, it is common to encounter people working in teams where each person can do the other’s role – each member is an all-rounder. The business owner has deliberately created this structure so that absence or employee turnover will allow the remaining members to make up the resource gap. There are very few specialists if at all. This is an efficient system, where you will have people with average competency making deliveries, operating from the principle of ‘fear of loss’ and not geared to deliver the best output. Everybody is a ‘Doer’, and seems to be doing similar tasks. In extreme case even the business owner becomes ‘Chief Worker’ rather than a ‘Chief Entrepreneurial Officer’. Such an organization is so busy doing that there is very little ‘Managing’ or ‘Thinking’ time. In making the transition from being small to becoming big, a highly performing organization must have separation of ‘Thinking’, “Managing” and ‘Doing’ in its organizational structure.

The CEO and top management should wear the strategic thinking hats and mainly be concerned with thinking on how to take the enterprise forward. Their role involves little managing of business processes and a very minimal role as a task doer.

The senior managers are the key persons driving the product/service delivery and their dominant role is to manage. It is important the they play minimal role as the task doers and must think of how to make their departments play out its key role in driving the organization forward.

The junior staff in contrast, are the task-doers and play an important role in the efficient completion of assigned activities. They manage the assigned activities and think on improving the productivity of the activities they are accountable for.

This structured role allows participants to play specialist roles which gives each a sense of purpose and there is clarity of expections from each individual based on the competency required at each level of the organizational structure.

Clearly there must be enough task-doers and the managers should never be asked to stretch across to fill gaps as a task-doer – this has a demoralizing effect on them, distracting them from their role as managers, consequently both delivery quality and productivity suffers.  

The separation of think-manage-do increases span of control of the top level and senior level managers which will still allow for a flat and efficient organization structure. The structure has the CEO as the strategic thinker at the top, who should use hired experts to multiply himself, a few functional specialists must play the key role as managers – the link between thinking and doing and lots of energetic junior staff who are the task-doers.

The next blog will dwelve into the need to have the right systems that augment organizational performance through process standardization.

Visit www.mapcerebri.com

To get the full picture please see the following links –

The Phantom Ceiling Effect

How do you recognize the phantom ceiling effect?

Breaking through the Phantom Ceiling

Review your Revenue Model

Structure – System – Staff and the Role of the Chief Entrepreneurial Officer