The 6 Points To Operations Excellence
Operations, Systems, Metrics and Communication are the key to ensuring a healthy organization that ensures profitability. There's a fortune being lost every day in businesses by small, unintended choices that are being made by default, rather than with purpose. How a company organizes its workflow processes is vital to keeping all of its departments properly monetized. What good is it to have 70% of your departments operating optimally, just so the last 30% can suck away all of your time and profit? It's very difficult to objectively examine something when you're close to it. Whether it's your business, department, employees, vendors or customers, a separation is needed for you to see the whole picture, and that's where I come in. It takes intention, practice, detachment, and focus to do so.
Operations Architecture
Solid Operations Architecture is paramount for success. Most organizations end up where they are out of default by following the path of least resistance and adding where they need to at the time it becomes apparent. The issue is they often look back to only analyze if they set it up incorrectly or if there is a major issue. In the meantime, significant amounts of time and money are secretly being lost. Are there small holes in your business that are slowly compounding over time and eroding your profits?
A company org chart doesn't cut it. It's not just how the employees are 'positioned' to work together, but the means of communication between them, how they officially hand off projects, the agreed upon deliverables from one department to another, and the collective goals for departments and the company as a whole.
Organization
Key Performance Indicators & Systems
Operations metrics to measure your business are an absolute necessity to gather and share insights among department managers to successfully assure everyone is focused on achieving the goals set forth by executive management. It’s how we gain insight into if our business systems are working effectively as a whole. Without these systems and metrics, you’re operating blind, and it makes it impossible to overcome any hurdles that are keeping you from growing to your potential, or expand the business.
What's your company culture? You expect everyone to be on the same page. You think you've communicated it through memorandums and meetings, but does it feel like your teams have actually bought in? Consensus requires an understanding and agreement by all, not just a head nod and affirmation that they "get it." Having a true understanding of the personalities that make up your teams is paramount to effective operations that produce results. See more on the Company Culture Page.
Company Culture
Executive Leadership
It goes without saying that the executive team must always be learning and adapting to the conditions of their companies, their industries, their competitors, and the economy as a whole. It requires a mindset to 'Always Be Learning.' Making sure that your leadership team is dividing and conquering accordingly, so as not to overlap duties, and effectively share information with oner another is their single highest priority. This gets overlooked often because "there's not enough time." It's time to make time. Those who are constantly learning will always be the leaders.
Team leaders and department managers need to lead by example. Most managers are appointed positions either by ambition or a necessity to have a leader emerge in order for a department to have accountability. But that doesn't mean they have had the necessary training or mentorship to understand how to best achieve that. How can you expect a team leader or manager to be effective without it?
Department
Leadership
The Envision Strategies Approach
The Envision Strategies approach to optimizing your company and workforce is attained through some or all of the following processes, based on the size and complexity of your organization: 1) On-going Leadership Discussions with the management team, 2) Weekly participation in departmental and/or company-wide meetings; first as 'employee shadowing' to see how the company operates currently and how management / team leaders work within their departments; second, discussions with those department leaders regarding ideation for improvements with recommendations and insights. 3) On-going Profit & Loss Analysis (in whole or in part) to better identify potential opportunities for cost savings or efficiency improvements. 4) Company organization chart and overall company workflow structure (bottlenecks). 5) Company systems review to understand how the company currently produces its services or product with insights and recommendations.