Process, process, process

[James]

Processes... They sound so boring. A set of instructions to do something to get to the result you want every time. 

I never liked processes to much coming from the customer service corporate world. 

When we started one of our most successful projects we vowed not to fall into the "corporate" trap. We thought processes were evil after having to follow them all those years.

When we started hiring team members everything was fine when we were a small organization.

As we crossed 25 people we started noticing certain tasks were not being done in the way they had to be done. 

When going back to the team and talking about it people were trained by different people and everyone had their own way of doing things. 

The problem was the result that we were looking for was not always the same. 

We learned that we would have to develop processes for people to follow to help scale the enterprise larger. 

So we got to work writing those dreaded "SOPs". 

It was not that most exciting work writing those standard operating procedures. Once it was done though we worked with the team to fine tune what we thought the process would be. 

The team was happy because the processes also set super clear expectations. 

We were able to define what is right and what is wrong. 

This was a huge pain to do so many years into the companies history but once it was done suddenly everything became a little easier. There were less questions and more work was being accomplished. 

Now I try to make a process for any activity I repeat over and over again so when I am ready to scale and hand something off to another person to do they know exactly what to do. They know exactly what is expected, they know their key performance indicators, and if they don't know they get to ask questions until they do and the process can be fine tuned. 

Now once you are done writing processes its time to go revisit those processes to see if they can be made more efficient. Work with the team that does the process on a day to day basis and figure out how it can be improved. Work with them and try different concepts. Be open minded but remember your team that does these things on the day to day will know better then you at that point. 

Have you worked or run a place that had no documented processes? What was that like? Have you had to make processes for a team to follow? Did you enjoy that experience?