So you’ve decided you can’t cost directly any more. You approach is now to improve processes for maximum efficiency. But what excuses are you likely to meet in rolling out these processes? And what can you do to counteract them?
Through work with operators, service companies and contractors of all types both in the UK and further afield here are STC’s ‘top excuses’ (and our most effective approaches to making them go away).
1. “I didn’t know about it.”
This is the inexcusable excuse from your organisation’s perspective…..treat the roll out of your process like a marketing and advertising campaign. We have witnessed several occasions where a large organisation has rolled out a new process by purely sending out an email with a large document attached, expecting everyone to just get on with it. Get those eye catching and curiosity inducing awareness raising posters out around the workplace. Get the Boss to make a direct personal communication to everyone affected. Use every opportunity and every medium to tell everyone what is coming. Create an identity for it and prompt it at every opportunity.
2. “My situation is different.”
Occasionally there is a genuine reason for parts of the organisation to require a slightly different approach to the norm – if so, design that in from the outset. But often we hear this excuse when it isn’t valid. Demonstrate with real life walk throughs to show that the common approach works for all business situations.
3. “I don’t understand it – it’s too complex.”
Think carefully about how you have designed your processes and how people are going to engage with it. Bring visual design concepts to the structure of the process so that it is easy to follow, understand and read. A 10-page flow-chart will not go down well, but a carefully thought out graphical view will be more appealing and draw people in to explore the detail they need to get to.
4. “tl;dr”
The texting generation knows this one only too well – “too long; didn’t read”. The worst thing you can do is email everyone a large document or manual and expect them to get on with it. One operator we’re aware of provided guidelines on how to run a project in two large volumes, several inches thick. Needless to say, the volumes had never been well thumbed. Start out with a single-field-of-view which shows the overall structure and key elements of your process. Not only does this encourage some early engagement, but also acts as a quick reference. Then provide more detailed materials layer by layer.
5. “Somebody else will do it.”
Many people don’t engage with a process because either they think it’s someone else’s job, or they genuinely are unaware of what their roles and responsibilities are. Therefore you need to ensure that all process materials clearly show who does what, and when, and make it easy to slice the process according to any one particular role. Being able to see who else is involved at various stages also helps to ensure some empathy between roles.
6. “It didn’t work last time.”
We can’t hide from the fact that people will often have a jaundiced view of your new initiative, because the roll out of the last one was a disaster. Don’t hide it − demonstrate that you have genuinely learned from the errors of the past and how this time you have designed to minimise the risk of failure. An engineering services client had tried twice to implement a new business management system complete with associated processes. Rather than try to resurrect the project again, their best option was to cancel all that had gone before, absorb the costs, and learn the lessons to plan a new solution with a new approach using a cross section of the organisation in the process.
Mark Rushton is the managing director of STC Global, an Aberdeen and Abu Dhabi based provider of design and learning solutions. Founded in 1996, the business has designed and implemented a range of industry processes with the dual aims of improving both consistency and efficiency in businesses where vital functions are mis-aligned and haemorrhaging cost.
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