Let’s talk about efficiency improvements for leaders. Why and How !!
Improving efficiency and getting things better! Sounds easy, but takes a lot of time and resource investment to get your job done well in that department! Generally, people do not take efficiency improvements as their priority in the initial stage of their new business or even in jobs. By improving efficiencies, what we mean is to improve your culture, minimize the quality gaps, make the turnaround times better and make employees happier to retain their positions in your team.
And, setting a goal to make things efficient is not about getting more things done. It should be about getting things done efficiently and save time for the rest of the things like researching new things and developing skills for the future.
To make anything better, start with your WHY!
To get things to fall in the right direction, leaders would need to make the organization process effective. By process, what we did at Adrixus Tech Studio was to let everyone put their inputs and efforts to make their process better with the management’s thinking side by side.
Yes, letting the teammates participating in the management process is the best opportunity any organization can ever get. The leaders might have seen a particular work environment only; when teammates participate in open discussions and improvement debates, things become better.
With the improvement of the process, team members can have a better understanding of their deliveries, goals and what they are going to build. A balanced act between business analysts and leadership team can help them define the scope, confirm or draft the deadlines and make the team ready to work together on those tasks.
Documentation is crucial for success!
Product development and client deliverables work together. Work quality and monetary both need balance for both the ends of the client and service teams. A business analyst can help here by providing ongoing support and balancing both the ends by documenting and revealing everything to make the process transparent.
We shape our tools and our tools shape us!
Tools are an essential part of the building and maintaining any new process for the teams. From managing tasks, finding gaps, analysing work outputs and improving the team’s turn around times, tools can help us! The entire project can be planned in advanced in the management tools even before jumping into development or deployment of the project.
Team’s tasks, product tasks, management strategies and communication can be handled. To adopt Agile project management and educating team members about tools, organisations can start working from their roots. Even at Adrixus Tech Studios, we started working with the tools from the beginning to make sure once we scale, we do not end up making things worse.
Every new joiner of the team would be able to adopt it if good practices are maintained from the beginning. By adopting tools, strong planning between development, testing and delivery team can take place. And, this process is a never-ending process where all the team members would need to collaborate with each other continuously. What else than good tools would help here to improve efficiency in the team?
How to introduce the process to improve efficiency?
The process does not come with an on-off switch with it. From the inception of the organization, leaders and all the team members must get involved in making the process better and effective.
Starting from making the work culture a good place to spend time and learn something new together, to welcoming new team members and letting them adapt and help the organization to learn something new. Experience is the best teacher!
But, in this digital age and 21st century, adopting a new process with tools has become significantly easy! There are bots available which can help you with the daily meetings, reporting and analysis as well.
For example, we adopted standup bots in the communication tools to make sure people do not end up wasting their time in face to face meetings. Such tools also let collaborate team members with each other to show their dependencies on others and a transparent availability. Even at the individual level, documentation and getting your work verified by bots really helps!
Read now: How to grow business with the process?
There are also some great tools like Postman for API driven projects and shared development experience. These collaborative tools help to make work faster and easier. GitHub/BitBucket is also a great tool to let development teams collaborate!
Once you start working with tools and start establishing the process in the company, make sure you observe your team and gaps to improve at the granular level. By doing continuous observing details on the processes, one can improve executions, automated deployments and shared codes with proper branching mechanisms. Arranging learning meetups can help, where team members can share their challenges and learnings from previous projects.
Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.
To drive efficiency and improvements, along with the process, open and free work culture also helps. When organizations provide open work culture and flat process to let anyone collaborate with anyone, things become pretty. As everyone can share their experiences and learnings with everyone, it would help the organization grow faster without making a lot of mistakes. And that is what makes the company more efficient.
Also, communicating with the team and people can help you build that powerful culture. Just like the military, communication is the key. If you can clearly communicate your experience, routines and challenges you are facing along with your expectations, you would be able to the team on the right track of efficiency. This is not limited to topdown communication, it applies to all the team members.
Making mistake is a part of the process, but learning out of it and letting your team members experiment with tools and process is the key to bring efficiency!
Feedback and communication is a crucial part of running any successful startup. If any of them fails, startup starts losing its momentum in the market! Make sure you start working on making your organization more efficient by implementing process and learning from experiences.
Can end with a crucial last note, Ask the right questions to get the right feedback which will lead you eventually to improve the culture, efficiency and transparency between the team, work and clients.
