Identifying and documenting your core organisational processes are the foundations for making the most of it, and getting closer to efficiency and cost savings, repeatability and scalability and confidence with bigger impact.
When you have identified and documented the key steps in your core processes, you have better clarity and grip on how your organisational processes should run. Without clarity, it is extremely hard to start making improvements.
Identifying opportunities for improvement might seem overwhelming. Where do I start? How do I know whether this is the real problem? You might know where there is a problem, but might not feel equipped to find out what it is and how to solve it. This activity takes you through a very simple yet effective set of questions to guide you to the root cause and solve problems worth solving.
By asking the following questions, you follow a robust approach to comb through your processes and find opportunities to improve the way you run your organisation.
- Which process is not working or causing the most frustration in your organisation?
- Specifically, which step in the process is not working (refer to your documented process)?
- Which one of these three is not working: does it take too much time/ does it cost too much money/ is the quality of the product or service weak, or inconsistent?
- Discover the root cause: Use the Five Why’s approach. The Five why’s technique is a simple yet effective way to get to the heart of a problem, enabling organisations and individuals to make more informed decisions and implement long-lasting solutions rather than just dealing with symptoms. It promotes a deeper understanding of the issues and helps prevent recurrence.
Here is how you do the Five Why’s:
As soon as you have clearly named the problem, ask why the problem occurred. This is the first “why.” Your answer should point to an immediate or proximate cause. Whatever answer you get, ask “why” again. This is the second “why.” Continue asking “why” and answering each question in turn.
You don’t have to ask exactly five times, the guideline of five comes from the notion that five iterations of asking why is usually sufficient enough to reveal the root cause.
It is important that you take a moment to think clearly, be honest and vulnerable. It could be helpful to run through this process with a leader that you trust.
Example:
The problem: Zara’s bakery has to get rid of left over bread and cake, specifically more expensive bread and cake to bake, that was not sold at the end of the day and as a result she is losing the time and money that was put in to bake the produce.
Why? They seem to be baking too much of this specific bread and cake every day.
Why? They are not baking based on demand but rather a standard amount every day.
Why? They do not know what the demand for these special produce would be the next day.
Why? They do not have a way of collecting orders from the community for these special and specific products.
Why? They do not know how to capture or collect orders in a sustainable way.
Great! Now Zara knows where to start, so the next morning she will call a team meeting, talk through the problem with her team and they will start brainstorming how to solve it. In the next course, Make technology work for you, you will find out how Zara and her team managed to solve this problem at no additional cost.