Janie’s Insights on Organisational Processes
- Optimising resources: Organisations should ensure processes maximise output from time, energy, and money invested.
Experience 1 – Setting up a new organisation (Finance & Operations Director):
- Responsible for creating foundational systems (finance, IT, HR, governance, strategy).
- Prioritised mission-critical processes that ensured integrity and efficiency.
- Focus was on establishing these quickly and effectively.
Experience 2 – Inheriting weak systems in a charity:
- Found poor record-keeping and governance.
- Urgent priority: clarify financial health (no budget, unclear cash flow).
- Instead of doing all the accounting work herself, she hired a temporary accountant to set up systems.
- Freed her to focus on fundraising and strategy.
Key approach to prioritisation:
- Identify operational “blockers” that hinder organisational progress.
- Distinguish urgent vs. non-urgent processes.
- Use appreciative inquiry when problems are not obvious.
- Work with staff to reduce time wasted on processes so more energy goes to mission delivery.
Foundational practice recommendation:
Collaborative tools (Microsoft 365 & Teams):
- Enabled real-time collaboration on documents.
- Solved version control issues.
- Reduced the number of unnecessary face-to-face meetings.
- Facilitated cross-team subgroups (finance, marketing, design, customer experience) to work together effectively (e.g., annual accounts project).
- Improved efficiency, communication, and project tracking.
Final encouragement to leaders:
- Reflect on current organisational processes.
- Identify which practices are helping and which may be hindering progress.