How to Standardize Operations Across Departments

Sarah Touzani, COO at Creditspring, May Ong, Business Operations Manager at Hofy, discuss standardizing ops.

AdaptivOps recently had the pleasure of speaking with two highly-respected professionals in their field. Our first expert, Sarah Touzani, COO at Creditspring, has a strong background in banking consulting, though she has been working in startup operations for more than three years. And our second expert, May Ong, Business Operations Manager at Hofy, has worked in business ops for years, and her current position has her helping remote organizations improve their processes. In today’s post, both Sarah and May will share their best practices for standardizing operations across departments while mitigating change management.

3 Problems to Anticipate When Enforcing Change Without Change Management

During new process implementations, there are three main problems that you will have to overcome. Identifying these kinds of problems early on is vital for ensuring the success of organizational changes and new implementations:

Managing a lack of adoption by stakeholders

Recently, May Ong encountered this issue while implementing a new CRM system. Due to poor experiences the stakeholders had with a previous CRM system, their engagement level was pretty low. They were not convinced that the new process was going to provide them with a significantly better experience. This was especially problematic since the new system required more engagement to ensure better data quality. As a result, May and her team had to address the issue quickly, otherwise, the system would have become completely redundant.

Different departments wanting their own features

During a scoping session, it is the standard operating procedure to gather everyone’s input. While this is great in theory, if it is not managed properly, the requests from a scoping session on a new project can get out of hand very quickly. You essentially get a “wish list” from every department of want they want to see in the new system. So, during those scoping sessions, it is best to set very clear expectations for the stakeholders right from the start. If you put together an action plan for how those requests will be prioritized, and department heads are aware of these priorities, the entire process will be much easier to manage.

A lack of consistency across departments

It is extremely common to experience a lack of consistency across departments when it comes to the ways in which they use a new system. Everyone had different interpretations of what they could (or should) do with the new process. For example, May Ong worked with salespeople who had different ideas of when a conversation with a client should be registered as a new lead in the system. The best solution was not to try to control their behavior, but rather to work with each department’s leadership team to establish how the system was intended to be used, and how those intentions could be implemented within their existing processes. This allowed for greater consistency without taking agency away from the sales team.

The Process of Standardizing Cross-Departmental Operational Changes

1. Get Stakeholders On Board — In Sarah Touzani’s experience, if you enter a project with a new team and implement a process without their buy-in, they will stop using the process as soon as you are gone. Thus, it’s important to set up an initial session where you try to understand exactly what the team needs, discuss the issues they have already identified, and demonstrate how a new process can be valuable to them.
2. Consider Upstream & Downstream Impacts — Every process has some kind of upstream or downstream impact. It’s important to map out these impacts early on, potentially before you even have your first session with stakeholders. This ensures that when you roll out a new process, it is one that allows for cross-functional collaboration, rather than a tunnel-vision process meant for a specific problem at a specific point in time. Even if you cannot know the exact upstream and downstream impacts ahead of time, the knowledge that these impacts will inevitably arise helps shape the questions you ask during the initial project scoping meeting. Since there is always room to overlook a potential affected department or stakeholder, May Ong always ends every session by asking the same question: “Is there anyone else you work with who would require this information?”
3. Start With an Iterative Process — Sarah Touzani is a firm believer in starting small and adding layers to a process once it has already been implemented. By implementing a “light” process and ensuring that it actually makes sense for the team or organization, you can have a stronger foundation to build from. If you don’t start small, you could run the risk of overengineering a solution that is going to slow down the team. Introducing a small or incremental change also makes it easier to ensure buy-in from all affected stakeholders and teams, as it is faster and cheaper to implement. Moreover, it allows you to see how the change is used so that you can build on top of the foundational process later on.
4. Keep Messaging Consistent — Consistent messaging is vital, both inside and outside of a project team. If a project team doesn’t have consistent internal messaging, it makes it impossible to deliver a consistent and effective message to stakeholders. May Ong believes that it is good to have a singular “voice” on every team or department who has been involved in implementing the process and understands the central message. This way, you don’t have to worry as much about communications getting lost in translation between different departments.
5. Reassess — After teams have had time to sink their teeth into a new process, Sarah Touzani always goes back and reassesses the process and its workability. If you started with an iterative process, then you likely need to continue adding layers anyway, and reassessing the usefulness and usability of the process is necessary for improving and perfecting the new process going forward. So, assess how Phase 1 went and use the opportunity to look for potential gaps or mistakes that you might have missed the first time around. Additionally, take the time to ensure that stakeholders are still onboard and approve of new layers being added in the future.

How to Deal With the 3 Common Pitfalls of Implementing Changes

1. A Lack of Cross-Functional Collaboration — To avoid this (or cope with it after the fact), increase transparency across your teams. The exact steps you must take will naturally depend on the size of your organization and the nature of the project, however, by increasing transparency at every level, you help users understand how the task you’re doing affects all other areas, teams, and departments. Sharing key data points is an important part of this transparency. In addition, you need to share accountability with stakeholders, which means that you need to get their buy-in very early on, as well as the support of those “voices” in each department.
2. The Process Is Not Being Used — This issue is not always easy to identify quickly. However, it is most common to see when there is a particular incident or human error. In this case, you need to immediately take a deep dive into the reasons for the issue and work to ensure that it is not repeated. Once you can fill in any potential gaps, this leaves you with a good opportunity to reiterate the value of the process to teams and stakeholders. This way, you reduce the risk of low engagement in the future.
3. Difficulty Aligning Across Departments — When dealing with alignment issues, always show empathy and patience. People appreciate being listened to and being shown that their concerns are being taken into consideration. In most cases, we celebrate when teams win, but we’re not happy when their experiments don’t work. Instead, we should celebrate the way they think about those experiments, whether or not they succeed. When you only celebrate the outcome, you may be putting too much emphasis on luck. Instead, focus on the process and the positive intent behind it.

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