I loved the below post from Ian Harris (founder of the brilliant Agency Hackers network). As a real lover of process, it really stood out for me, highlighting that process really is an enabler, not a limiter.
In light of the above – and as I continue my quest to get people to acknowledge ‘process is powerful’, I’ve dropped in the video of my chat with Cat Navarro. Cat Navarro is the guru of process and COO of flown.com.
I was lucky enough to speak to her about how agencies can use process to accelerate and streamline their workflows, the importance of great process and some excellent examples on how to break down and tackle process work.
Why would you need to do process work?
1.) There’s a pain point – maybe something something’s just not working or maybe the quality of the work just isn’t that great, costs might be starting to increase or things are moving that bit too slow
2.) You’re spending a lot of time training new starters – this tends to happen when agencies are growing and beginning to hire lots of new people
3.) You’re about to embark on something completely new – a new product or service, and you just don’t know how to deliver it
The IPO (input process output) approach – a simple way to approach process
- The input – your ingredients
- The process – the recipe
- The output – a beautifully finished ‘cake’
• Start with the output – what are you trying to achieve?
• Then think about the inputs
• Then tackle the process
An example – scope creep
1.) Why is it happening – this is the most important step when it comes to process work, you cannot fix anything if you don’t know why it’s going wrong
2.) Identify the problem – is it that the scope is not clear, is it that your team don’t know how to manage clients or is it that the client isn’t happy about the work that’s being delivered – and therefore the scope keeps changing
3.) All these things will require you to consider that particular part of your process
4.) Identify the perfect result – is it a signed off scope of work / work that’s delivered with X percent margin in X amount of time
5.) The look at your input – what do you need in order to get the output? Do you need to consider how many revisions you’ll make, who the key contact is, is there a tone of voice? At this stage it’s incredibly important to involve the people who will be doing the process to really feed into this
6.) Then you can start working on your recipe – which inputs do you need to make that perfect ‘cake’?
So many excellent points in this video – if you’re an agency struggling with process then give it a watch.
Andy.