Your team's frustrated. Deadlines are slipping, customers are unhappy and errors are creeping in - yet the way you've done things has gotten you this far and you're confident you have the right tools for the job.
These are the symptoms of a business that needs to start asking questions about how work gets done and whether people are set up to do it.
Staff turnover, rapid growth and underinvestment in key areas are all common reasons why these symptoms occur in the first place. So rest assured, sometimes it's normal to feel like your operations are held together by duct tape and coffee.
But when do you need to focus on your ways of doing things, rather than the technology you need to support them?
It starts with understanding the problem you're trying to solve.
Perhaps you've lost sight of why something's happening, how it's being done or what changes if your business goals shift. It could be that team members each do things their own way, or that operations depend on knowledge sitting inside one person's head (everyone's favourite, the single point of failure).
This lack of common understanding tends to show up in familiar ways. Work passing between teams is delayed, problems keep surfacing unexpectedly, the number of rewords and corrections only rises and there's a general sense that things should be different.
It can be easy to think that doing a full process review is a distraction keeping people from doing their day jobs, especially when firefighting is every week's priority. But when was the last time you asked your team how they're coping and how they would improve things given the opportunity?
The answers might surprise you.
In practice, a process review involves sitting with team members to understand how they do things, why they do them and to create baseline level of understanding through process documentation. It involves asking the difficult questions like:
From there, you can create a revised process that builds on their feedback and embeds the small innovations your team had been keeping to themselves.
You know you have good process design when you have well-defined inputs and outputs, clearly identified roles and responsibilities, and key decision points that balance efficiency with oversight.
Of course, you may already feel confident in your processes. The challenge might be that your team can't execute them effectively and so instead of the outcomes you're expecting to see, you're experiencing symptoms like longer sales cycles, delays in project delivery and a drop in customer satisfaction.
More often than not, the culprit is work about work: people manually moving data between systems, compiling reports by hands, generating documents from scratch or sending email templates. At this stage the focus shifts to making technology work for you, not against you.
If you've already reviewed your processes, you should have a good understanding of how your business is using technology. If not, you'll have to hone in on what tools your team are using and whether they're having to work around any software limitations.
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to deploy tools that support your team by being both fit-for-purpose and scalable. It's rare you'll find a single solution that meets all of your requirements and will instead need workflow automation tools to stitch together your portfolio.
It’s also worth noting that technology is rarely a set-and-forget exercise. Wraparound processes are often needed to ensure data remains accurate, workflows effective and integrations running smoothly, the rigour of which varies based on the risks you need to manage.
Always remember: the technology you invest in should support the processes you have in place, not lead them.
If you're not sure where to begin, start by listening. Ask your team what's slowing them down, map out how work really gets done and then look at what can be handed off to technology. It’s not glamorous, but it’s how high-performing teams create time for the work that matters.
If you're still at a loss, or don't have the time to tackle this yourself, our business process improvement and technology support services are designed to help.