Businesses have processes. Ideally, these processes are our heroes. If followed they will: complete tasks, take leaderships’ visions to fruition and effectively use the resources at hand. They can be the capstones of your department. To be efficient these processes are concrete and inclusive, seemingly unchangeable. There are processes for everything in our daily corporate lives. When something is really important we ensure that it is done, by the ‘book’. Processes have weight; they have a tangible cost in our daily productivity. As managers we not only build on them but others count on them for insight into your, standing guidance on the subject. So what happens when things change and as a business we adapt. The old stone does not quite fit. So we chip away at them, paste on an addition here or a cut something else less hard to make the old square rock fit into the once circular gap. They have been tested and proven, why change them?

Review them! If you want to be effective your whole team needs to be able to adapt! The best place to start is in the documentation. A department can be made, or in some cases broken, by their documentation. It ensures resiliency by giving new team members a starting point. It shores up the collective understanding, allowing team members to cover one another during times of unavailability. If centralized it allows for growth and team buy in. The entire team should be contributing to the documentation, correcting inconsistencies. Centralize your documentation so that everyone on the team has access to it. Documentation will natively, create a standard because every time a task is taken it will be done in accordance with the documentation. Enforce this. As these standards start to emerge, encourage them. Start projects to get your outliers to conform to the standard. Take steps to move towards single sources of truth; a central database (could be as simple as a spreadsheet) that stores all the information in a means that every team member can update/contribute.

Once there is a standard it is time to quantitate the frequency of the tasks so that you can appropriately allocate resources. Find your most commonly accomplished tasks. Do them yourself. Do not take shortcuts. Follow them start to end. Dig into it and figure out why each task is done. Review to see if the task is being completed to the sufficient standard. To understand your process look at whom it impacts. Are there other departments that receive this product or is it going directly to a customer. Is your product meeting their needs? Observe, the individuals on your team accomplishing the task. Measure and report the inputs and outputs of the process and compare each of your processes.

Now that you have a clear idea of what your central processes are, it’s time to look into automation. If you can click it or type it into a computer, it can be scripted. With that said, don’t expect an all knowing Artificial Intelligence, yet. Build scripts that accomplish your centralized tasks in accordance to your documentation in a way that each team member can run them. Review the products of your automation with your customers. Ask for feedback from your team. Try to understand the return on allocation of resources: you had one team member take the time to learn a scripting language to the point they could complete a process, now, that process takes how much less time to accomplish. So much less time to accomplish, that over the course of the next quarter the time spent learning the scripting language is half that of the time saved by the product. Any time it is a 1:1 time spent script to time saved, I’d go for it! Anytime it comes up it can be done with the click of a button. Down the line, you won’t have to teach someone how to do the task either, they would just how to run the script. Figure out how long you are willing to wait for the return on your investment: a week, a month, a year? Move through all of your processes. Automate what makes sense to automate. Track your time savings (these are concrete accomplishments for reviews). Report your time savings.

The last step is the most important. The hand off. How do you get your scripts to be maintained by the team that runs them and not your developer? Have the scripts pull from a centralized single point of truth, so that every one of your team member can update the data. Train the entire team to understand the impact of the wrong info and how to diagnose the output of it. Most importantly though, enforce the upkeep of the centralized data.