4 signs your company needs better process management
Have you ever found yourself sitting in a mandatory meeting and thinking to yourself „Well, this 1-hour long meeting could’ve been an email“ Or have you ever run through different departments to find someone responsible to answer your questions? Well, then this blog post is for you. Here are five signs your company needs better process management:
1. There are a lot of meetings with little to no tangible outcome
Yes, meetings are important, not only to come to a common understanding or reach a specific goal but also to brainstorm new ideas, or get everyone involved in a project together in one room and fix certain issues that came up during the project.
While it is normal that some meetings might feel painfully long and could be condensed and more efficient, if the majority of meetings do have little to a non-tangible outcome, then you might want to take a closer look at process management in your company.
2. It’s often not apparent who is responsible for which task
Oh boy, how often have I run through different departments to find someone who could answer one single specific question that I needed the answer for? Not only does this waste precious time, but it also is very discouraging to run through the whole company, feeling like a ping-pong ball flying from department to department. And more than once, my journey to find answers led from one department to various others, only to end up in the first department again. If you don’t have specified and openly documented (this step is specifically important) the different roles in your company or a certain project, then you might be up for a whole lot of trouble in the future. The more complex certain processes are, the harder it is to navigate through a project where the roles are not defined. If you need a quick fix to set responsibilities, I can highly recommend using the RACI matrix. This allows you to rethink the roles in your company and project, and define them easily and efficiently: https://project-management.com/understanding-responsibility-assignment-matrix-raci-matrix/
3. There have been mistakes in the past, where no responsible person could be determined
Mistakes happen, I get it. Mistakes are not even necessarily a bad thing, but only if you take the opportunity to learn from them. And if the responsibility of certain mistakes from the past got pushed from one person or department to another without being able to trace the error, the chance of improvement gets taken away. It is obviously very important to nurture a working atmosphere that allows mistakes to be made without being shamed for them. Nevertheless, it is very important to be able to track where errors happen, and where the responsibilities of certain processes are.
4. Your employees are constantly stressed
If your employees are constantly stressed, two reasons should be looked into: Either you have too much work for not enough employees, OR your work processes are not efficient enough to allow your employees to thrive in their work field. Most often, it’s a little bit of both. Nevertheless, constantly stressed employees are not a healthy sign of a thriving company but a good indicator that something is wrong. That’s why it is not only important to have good process management but to also think about how you can make the work of your employees easier and more enjoyable.