The beginning of a new year is a fitting occasion to pause, facing forwards with an optimistic anticipation, out feet grounded in rational calculation. We expect to succeed. We will focus on the important, sweat the details and live our core values.

One of these values includes “Make every touch a referable experience.” So hat tip to our EOS® Implementer family and many Vistage International chairpersons — we are humbled by your kind referrals.

We are in business to add to the community around us by improving our clients’ core process teams’ ability to accomplish their organization’s vision and purpose. We do this by improving their situational awareness and emotional empathy and accountability to each other. To identify and present issues accurately and in a mentally safe way that fosters collaboration and enables all of them to be smarter than any one of them. To enable them to focus their leaders on the right next improvements constantly. To be amazing process triagers.

We are thankful for 2019’s best-year-yet successes and what makes ProcessTriage® and our triaging workshop experience possible: Each client’s success supported by our certified triage facilitators. Thank you for the opportunity to make a contribution, however slight or significant. Here are some of our new (2019) and what we hope are friends for life (logo’s link to home pages).

We wish our ProcessTriage® community a prosperous 2020. Remember, cosmetic updates to your process maps are free (PDF’s) with a modest reprint and shipping fee.

Most of this blog’s readers are familiar with the ProcessTriage® process pain point solution categories — ANALYZE, DESIGN, TRAIN, and ENFORCE. That ANALYZE and DESIGN (and IMPLEMENT) solutions highlight process design flaws that inhibit scalability, while TRAIN and/or ENFORCE best practices are operating system and human factor opportunities that otherwise assert the process ought to be scalable. We examine each triage session’s list of process improvement proposals, calculate the proportions of these categories and assess the process’s scalability. While the sample size is small — 20 or so proposals per triage, scalability patterns develop over scores of triage sessions.

For example, intuitively, a generally healthy growing company should be following proven best practices while making occasional process design improvements as productivity (process volume) increases. This reflects the reality that “If you’re growing, your processes are breaking.” The majority of improvements should be operating system and human factor focuses with a lesser share of proposals focused on process design opportunities.

Here’s what this profile looks like. The client identifying data is redacted:

Healthy, growing process highlights:
Most of the improvements are quick win action item Small Now’s (89%)
Most of the improvements are operating system focused TRAIN and/or ENFORCE best practices (79%)
All the process pain point causes were well understood — no ANALYZE root cause requirements.
There were some process DESIGN (and IMPLEMENT) updates — 21% (1 in 5) recognizing the process is
stressed. This growth breakage is normal and healthy.

If you would like to see how scalable your core processes are, we welcome a conversation. If we agree that triaging is a fit, we’ll make quick work of it.

One of the more popular deliverables of our Process Triage workshop is the Action-Result style process map. The map is an easy-to-build and read illustration of the triage team’s process. It’s designed to last one to three years with occasional cosmetic updates. It shows the essential tasks and their outcomes, typically from Opportunity to Cash — from the first conversation with an interested prospect all the way to payment for products or services.

We had the privilege to triage with Goosetown Communications, in Congers, New York in mid-2017. David Gottlieb sponsored and Jason Schlesinger hosted and led the implementation. They’re also running on EOS®, a branded operating system we enthusiastically support based on our experience with post-triage successes.

While planning a triage on a different process, I noticed Jason’s triage map behind him during our video call. It’s fascinating —

After successfully implementing the Process Capability Improvements that our Process Triage developed for us, I discovered that the large Process Map that I had hung up on my office wall could serve an additional purpose.  It could be the perfect visual aid for tracking project status throughout the Process.  I took some sticky pad notes and quickly wrote down some job names and numbers and stuck them up on the wall to indicate where they were in the Process.  As the jobs progressed, I would move the sticky note down the map until completed.  Within a few weeks, I had close to 100 sticky notes plastered across the map.

Two things became immediately apparent:
       
I, or anyone else in my office, could swing around in my chair and quickly see the general status of any particular project.  If more specifics were needed, I could always look the job up in our CRM software, but for a quick at-a-glance look, this was by far the fastest way to review large quantities of projects in short order.
     
Much like pain-points become clustered together in problematic parts of the Process during our Triage, I also noticed that I could quickly see at which part of the process jobs were stalling, and allocate labor accordingly.  If I had sticky notes of several jobs stuck in the “punch-list” phase, or the “order parts” phase, I could check in with those departments to encourage the backlog to move along more efficiently.

The Process Triage map, which is so helpful in keeping jobs moving through the Process, now also serves as a means for me to quickly track the status of those jobs within the same Process.

Jason Schlesinger, Goosetown Communications.

For Jason’s size of company — with scores of custom engineering and installation in process, here’s a way to show projects-in-process, from opportunity all the way to cash.

If you’re a custom manufacturer or construction trades contractor, with about scores of jobs in progress, consider Jason’s approach.

We welcome your call.

A lot of your executive leader effort focuses on championing your enterprise’s goals — what you measurably want to achieve, and your culture — how you want to go about, in terms of motives, morays, and morals.

Physically and tactically, this involves designing, building, and sustaining scalable business processes (how valuable things get made) and the expert teams that run them. Well designed processes deliver business results when trained and enforced. They are repeatable, scalable, sustainable, and affordable. If you design your processes to express your culture and values, they will achieve this as well, remembering culture trumps everything, but cash pays for it, and processes deliver it.

The idea is to get your business processes right, then staff, train, and run these processes with go-to teams of individual skill experts who, together, can continually improve the process. Bottoms up. With every improvement course-correcting closer to your goals, objectives, and culture.

It means those experts closest to the work are responsible for improving the work processes. Not you — not top down. It’s work you must find a way to delegate.

You must provide your process teams with two things your executive position gives you by virtue of your top-of-the-pyramid position: situational awareness and emotional empathy.

Situational awareness is knowing how everything in the business model fits and the dependencies between things – for example, from how a raw lead is generated, then handed off to sales and then on to fulfillment and ultimately accounts receivable to post the cash. It’s being aware of tools and technologies and who and what does what, and how all these things consume or create cash. Situational awareness is necessary for process triaging, and nothing expresses this awareness like a well crafted process map, one designed for issue processing. The best triaging map uses the terms and language of your go-to team members who live the process. This ensures their situational awareness is expressed in a clear and common language, and issues triage quickly.

Emotional Empathy includes the ability to understand and anticipate how teammates personally impact each other in and by their process. Team members are the more fulfilled, purposeful and productive — yes, happy, when others understand what they need and do, and vice versa. They know — on an emotional level, how what they do affects those down stream, as well as when to reach upstream and share insights that will help things run better. This empathy is developed by solving process problems — triaging together, collaboratively defining and measuring process pain points and working through solutions. In the plainest language, it means when it comes to core business processes, the teams that live in them must own the performance monitoring and issue processing. It has to be delegated out of the executive suite.

When we delegate this successfully, day-to-day operational problems are handled with a more nuanced, technically feasible and emotionally supportive solutions, all with strategic fit. The executive team has more time available for exclusively executive work, such as business development and longer horizon opportunities.

That’s what Process Triaging does.  It gives teams situational awareness and develops emotional empathy — two things master executives provide their highest performing teams.