Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell

Published in

The Startup

8 min readMar 27, 2019

Once a business grows to a certain level of success, it becomes an absolute necessity to organize daily tasks to avoid mistakes. Errors happen all the time, and inconsistencies can result in unhappy customers, tense employees, and unbudgeted costs.

The best way to organize these daily duties is to create and implement business processes. A process is a group of tasks that are performed within a business to obtain a specific objective — it is like a chain of events that guides a project from start to finish. By clearly outlining for yourself and your company what the main processes in your company are and how, ideally, they should work, you will gain greater efficiency.

How to Organize Your Business as It Grows

1. Take the plunge and decide to organize your business’s processes

In the first step, the decision is made to design the business’s processes to ensure quality and efficiency. The amount of work to be done can seem vast. There are, after all, many actions that take place daily in business. Even though organizing the main processes that happen in a firm is hard work, it is just a matter of moving forward to the following stages.

2. List the departments you lead

Next, broadly categorize the areas for which you are responsible. For instance, you might oversee sales and marketing, or you could be a small business owner who is responsible for everything in your firm. Clarify what these departments are.

Sometimes this step involves some more work than what is immediately apparent. If a person is responsible for everything in a firm, the number of categories that first comes to mind may be too numerous. If this is your case, try looking up business departments in other companies, and see which are the ones that are relevant to you.

3. Diagram the area you want to work on

Select one department to improve. To practice, you can start with the easiest one or the area you know the best. The next step is to diagram how it works now. The diagram is used to demonstrate how the processes are currently being performed.

Figure out what the primary processes are and then diagram them. The diagram itself does not have to be perfect, but it does need to represent reality as it currently is.

The goal here is to find hidden inefficiencies and time-wasters. For example, a diagram of the accounts payable process under purchasing would include some of the following steps:

· Receive bill

· Record the bill in the system

· Receive approvals

· Pay the bill

You might be surprised by the obvious problems that show up once the processes are visibly laid out as they currently are. There might be redundancies or work that isn’t being done, for instance. Other times, the flow might be convoluted or doesn’t make sense. As you diagram, think about the best way to organize what you see and look for ways in which the processes you currently have can be streamlined.

4. Create a diagram of the area as you’d like it to be

Having looked at how tasks are currently handled, you can now create a diagram of how they should be treated. The process should be as simple and fluid as possible. The “Only Handle It Once” concept also known as the OHIO principle is beneficial to ensure items are only worked on completely at set intervals and not in bits and pieces. Otherwise, you run the risk of duplicating efforts and wasting time.

There are many examples of process flowcharts online, and they can be found by searching for business processes. Although it is vital to diagram the processes as thoroughly as possible, I recommend mapping them all in a way that makes the most sense to you. These diagrams can be perfected later.

Moving to a process-based model is iterative, so the processes in the firm will continuously be updated and improved as the team provides feedback and you learn about what works best for your particular situation.

[Photo: Brian Patrick Tagalong/Unsplash]

5. Classify the processes

Once your diagram shows a broad sketch of the processes in their ideal configuration, you are now ready to identify and classify them. First, list the macro processes for the department you are working on, which is the larger context for each of the processes you will design. Each department has its main macro processes that describe each of its main transactions. In my company, Celaque, one of the overarching processes in our Sales department is “Administration.” Here we include everything related to paperwork, such as digitally filing sent proposals and signed contracts as well as updating any reports. All this work is grouped and performed at one time only to save time.

Then, list out the processes that fall under the macro processes. It is also helpful to classify them according to type — recurrent or sequential. This categorization will help define how each process will work daily.

From here, you would take the pieces in your above diagram and classify each of the actions. As an example, you might set up the administrative process for Sales so that the team performs all the administrative work one day a week. The idea is to group all these types of tasks so that they are better organized. This group would be considered a weekly recurrent process.

Recurrent processes are those that repeat after a fixed interval of time. Some other examples are payroll and issuing financial statements. For these tasks, you should consider the following questions:

Determine time interval: is it a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly process?
What particular day should it start? If it’s a weekly process, should it occur on a Monday or a different day?
How does the process work with other processes? It’s worth it to look at what process is done before it and what is done after so that they are organized logically.
What other pieces work to make it a whole process? Sometimes, a recurrent process is made of various tasks that work together. Identify them.
Levels of review and how they interact: depending on the sensitivity of the item, consider having three levels of review. Focus on looking at how the levels work with each other and what days each person involved should execute their part.

Sequential processes are those that are triggered by a certain event. They are made of tasks that follow a checklist to ensure a result is delivered in the same consistent manner. An example of a sequential process is hiring a new employee: this is not something that happens weekly or monthly but rather as needed. Each time you must hire, though, a certain number of steps have to be taken.

The following are some things to take into account:

What event triggers the sequential process? Another example of this type of event could be a sale.
Once this set of actions starts, what is the order of the steps? What are the items in the checklist? For example, some of the steps that follow a sale may include documentation that is sent, contracts that are signed, approvals obtained, products that need to be prepared, and so on. These all need to be ordered chronologically.
Who is involved? How many levels of review? Take a look at who is responsible for executing each piece. If you decide to implement levels of review, make sure to add those as well.

6. Organize your processes

Before implementing, the processes you have listed should be laid out to see how they fit with one another along with the levels of review, if you have them.

For recurrent processes, you can get a monthly calendar and write out the recurrent tasks to see how they fit together.

Make sure to set up processes chronologically.
If there is more than one person for a particular area, look to ensure that their processes are coordinated so that the timings don’t conflict.

For sequential processes, set up all the steps in order. Make sure you are as thorough as possible so that they include all the descriptions necessary.

Also, be sure to standardize how you format your processes. At our company, we have a set code we use for each process, so it is more easily identifiable. We also make sure the description for each of the processes is the same throughout the company (Configuring Processes to Gain More Efficient Results).

7. Implement

You can use project management software to implement your processes if you don’t have the budget to purchase a business process management solution. At Celaque, we use Wrike, which is project management software. With Wrike, we can program our processes on the date they need to be worked on and assigned to the person who is responsible for them. Program your processes, and then train the people who will be executing them. Don’t worry about them being perfect, as there will always be errors and tasks that are incomplete. The most important thing is to start.

8. Review and test

Once the processes are implemented, follow up closely. Get thorough feedback the first week and each of the subsequent weeks. Look for:

Incomplete processes
Duplicated items
Problems with timing
Misunderstandings based on vague explanations

9. Modify and polish

Modify as you go along and polish your processes until they shine like jewels. Keep enhancing them, as processes are ever-changing, and this phase should continue indefinitely. The good news is that once you have a good base, modifications arising from changes in procedure, personnel, or timing will be easy to execute. Your hard work will be rewarded with better quality as well as happier employees and customers.

· Great Advice for Process Implementation in Your Company

· This is Our Monthly Accounting Close Process