Thursday, July 1, 2010
Every organization is different. The unique way that your organization works is what sets you apart from your competitors and makes you unique. From the way you approach prospective clients, to the ways you support the ones who've done business with you for years, your company has a way of doing things that make you unique. Most of the time, these methods are tied to the people that you've hired. They brought their way of doing things into the organization and those that worked well just stuck around. But, if you were to explain what your organization's secret sauce is, would you be able to articulate that to a new employee or potential investor?
How's it supposed to work? When a problem arises - a lost sales opportunity that should have been won, an unhappy customer, a broken software process, you never want to find yourself in a situation of trying to piece together a mystery of "how was it supposed to work," only to back into the cause of the reason why it didn't work. Playing Forensic Scientist at the crime scene, you've arrived after the damage has been done. Documenting the way things are supposed to work in an online collaboration space that's easily accessible to all employees speeds up the team's ability to diagnose and repair problems as they occur - and prevent them from occurring in the future.
Where's that document? The processes that your team follows to effectively do their job almost always involves documents. Lots of documents. From spreadsheets, to proposal templates, to checklists and beyond - being able to manage these documents in a secure, always-on environment is critical to a smoothly-run business. It's not uncommon to store documents in a massive "shared network folder." As digital information continues to grow out to nearly 1.8 zettabytes by 2011, organizations face the prospect of higher and higher storage costs. More importantly, this massive amount of old, outdated documentation obscures the most relevant ones, which incentivizes your employees to create mini-repositories of the documents that they need finger-tip access to. In other words, an ungoverned and disorganized shared network folder actually discourages collaboration.
Is there a better way to do this? You can't manage what you don't measure. Documenting your business process will immediately shed insight into how things are supposed to work and clarity into where the most important information and documents are located. Beyond that, however, a clearly documented business process allows the team to collaboratively improve the process, making it more efficient for everyone.
Who's going to train the new guy? A well documented business process is the ultimate insurance policy for your small business or growing concern. It's a rude awakening when a key employee suddenly exits, and takes all the information in his or her head out the front door with them. There's the obligatory exit interview, and perhaps even a couple of hours spent "writing down everything you know," but that's hardly a substitute for a rock solid, team-built collaborative business process that can be accessed by new employees from any location - even before they arrive at their first day on the job - bringing them completely up to speed on all the details of doing the job they've been hired to do.
Oops, I just stepped in that pot hole - again. Most people think of a business process in terms of how things currently operate. But, understanding what went into the decisions that got you to this point are critical to avoiding previous mistakes. Sometimes processes are complex for a reason - to avoid big huge pot holes in the middle of the road. In our daily jobs, we move so fast it's sometimes easy to forget when or why we stepped in them. Everyone knows that feeling that washes over you when realizing "Oh right, I remember why that won't work . . ." A documented business process online helps avoid repeating critical mistakes.
Documenting business process gets a bad rap because it doesn't add revenue to the top line, but unless your in sales/marketing there's oftentimes not much you can do to add to the top line anyway. Instead, focusing on being efficient with the dollars you do have is a great way to add value to the business.
Register for this Webinar to learn how B2B companies can build a central-source approach that embraces collaboration into the content process and give marketing and sales fingertip access to the relevant content they need at the time they need it.
