Insights
Insights
Recent Articles
Whenever I publish content, you can find it here. My writing is based on my experience and personal insight, and aims to help managers and business owners gain perspective and step out of their usual mindset.
If you’re wondering how my services can help you, or how I work, my articles can help you gain the insight you need to make more informed decisions about management consulting and best practices for your business in general.
Why bother with process improvement?
If you’ve worked a week in your life, chances are you’ve run into poor processes. Whether or not you realized it is another question. If you have a keen eye for efficiency, you might have even picked up on poor processes in places you’ve been a client or customer.
From a bigger picture perspective, process improvement can take many different forms. Most of them are unlikely to be entirely obvious to people who aren’t explicitly focusing on improving processes as they fit into the company as a whole, rather than as relevant to only them.
Great managers who delegate properly and avoid micromanaging often create, entirely by accident, a blind spot in which they don’t have enough of the details about how the tasks of a process are done to identify problems without looking for them deliberately.
What is a task, an activity, a process?
No matter how strong the management team, as a business grows, the amount of tasks, activities and processes that are carried out every day eventually grows to the point where no single person can keep all the details in mind.
When looking for opportunities to improve, or facing challenges growing, taking the time to map out all the processes, the activities they involve and the tasks they entail can make the difference between a breakout success, and a failed project.
Professional management consultants are specifically trained to investigate all relevant levels of information, to truly understand, define and communicate exactly what is going on in the business’s day to day operations.
What are you capable of and what is a business capability?
A qualified management consultant will be able to understand the reality of your business, end to end, and all the capabilities involved, stacked one on top of another that have driven your success in the past.
The consultant’s job is to help you clearly define the needs that are satisfied by each capability so that together, you can take an objective look at a clear picture of the current state of your business.
Once the management team is confident that their business lines are accurately represented, the consultant can help define a desirable future state for the business, as well as the strategy and road map to get there, including making recommendations on new ways of doing things, using updated tools, or bringing in supporting technology that your team may not be aware of or may not know how to implement.