How can you use the individual steps of your process procedures journey to focus your business on:

• Adapting your core business processes to process change?
• Building repeatable business processes?
• Adhering to process standards or regulations?
• Managing your business processes more effectively?

Each step of your process procedures project results in an important milestone being reached.  Your entire process procedures project will move along better and quicker, with better results, if you achieve each milestone.

Figure 1 depicts the business process procedures journey work flow.  The journey starts with project management.  The extent of a business process change can be large or small — they may or may not require written procedures — but even small process changes require basic project management to avoid having the law of unintended consequences catch up with them.

1. Process Procedures Project Management

To get the buy-in of your employees, start your process procedures project with a project charter that focuses your team on clear project goals and objectives.  For example, if you’re working on an accounts receivable process, be sure receivables clerks consistently follow the process.

Your process procedures project plan should allow time for the six steps in your process procedures journey: allow about 12% for project planning, 13% for process design, 25% for procedure writing, and 50% for process procedure implementation, training, process auditing, and a management review at the end of the project (Figure 2).

Figure 2 – Process Procedures Project Time

Process procedures project management key milestone: completion of your project charter and project plan.

2. Process Mapping and Process Design

Your procedures process map should include the sequence of process steps with clearly defined inputs, documents, and records.  Make a special note of the process flow metrics, responsibilities, and goals.  For example, an accounts receivable process should note the invoices per hour processed, who is responsible for cash, write-off, or discount approvals, and how close the process is to the goal of collecting within thirty days.  This information will help with later procedure writing, process training, and process auditing.

For many business processes, a process map may be the only documentation needed.  Not all processes require procedures, work instructions, or anything more than a process map.  In fact, a form may be all you need.  It is really a matter of scale: the more employees you have involved in a given function — the more complex it is — the more formal process documentation you’ll need.

Process procedures process mapping and design key milestone: complete “current state” process map with process data.

Next week, we’ll cover writing policies and procedures.  Procedure writing is a result of formal, required compliance and training.  It is often much easier to comply with standards - and train employees – when you work with a written procedure.

If you’re interested in learning more about your procedures, e-mail us at info@bizmanualz.com or call us at 314-863-5079 for a procedure review.  We’re happy to provide feedback on what you’re currently using and show you how we can help you improve your processes.

Phase I – Project Initiation

The primary purpose of Project Initiation is to discover the project’s scope — where are its boundaries?  As you see in Figure 1, you need to determine and document the User Requirements & Project Assumptions, produce a Business Case Justification & Feasibility Study, and put together a Project Charter and Project Team.

User Requirements & Project Assumptions

You need to collect data, objective evidence, and examples of the business problem at hand in order to begin framing the project.  Start by interviewing users to answer some basic questions:

• Who or what groups are impacted today?
• What pains do they experience?
• What will the improvement look or feel like?
• How will the environment or daily work practices change?
• What are the desired project benefits and costs?
• What cannot be done and why?

Talk to management about their project assumptions — time frame, budget, resource availability, standards, regulations, and other data — because they impact the problem. Note: You are not solving the problem yet, but quantifying it.  It is important to collect facts at this stage.

In this stage, “facts” include assumptions and perceptions, so get everything on paper and/or recordings.  Use an audio or video recorder to collect quotes.  You will use all of these facts to build your business case justification.

Business Case Justification & Feasibility Study

You start your business case research with a feasibility study.  Now that you know what users want, you need to find solutions, technologies, or methods that will help resolve their issues.  Collect qualitative data from your process analysis, industry benchmarks, and through industry research.

Your feasibility study will:

• Define the business issue, problem, or opportunity
• Research industry benchmarks, technologies and methods
• Determine industry solutions, alternatives and trade-offs
• Explain selected solutions, their benefits and risks
• Provide solution recommendation

One of the most important details at this stage is the Return on Investment (ROI).  You’re asking management to make an investment — management expects to get some type of return on the investment.  Usually you’re asked for the financial ROI but even if the return is intangible, you need to justify the expenditure.

Start by determining your objectives, measure,s or cost variables and establish a baseline figure for comparison.  Project baseline and expected results (as per objectives) should be for a reasonable interval (e.g., 12 months) after project completion.  Be sure to explain how or when the sponsor/champion will experience the effect of the cost savings or other justification.

Management may also want to know the risk exposure and how this investment compares with alternative capital uses, using Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Economic Value Added (EVA), or Net Present Value (NPV) calculation. Conclude with the total cost of ownership, or TCO, including intangible benefits that will be realized, too.

You are now ready to build your business case justification using the data from your user requirements, project assumptions, and feasibility study. Your business case is designed to convert all the data into information that convinces management – or the customer - that your project will deliver positive results. It should answer who or what groups are impacted, what the benefits and risks are for the selected solution, and what it will cost in terms of time and money.

Project Charter

Projects start with an idea, yet we don’t know what we don’t know. Projects require some learning and solutions will evolve.  So, how do you focus a project team on your solution? You start with a project charter, used by the project manager to document and communicate a common understanding of the project with all stakeholders — management, customers, and the project team. The project charter focuses the project team on the main elements of the project in order to control the dreaded scope creep that often seems to invade projects.

Scope creep: small changes that, individually, may appear acceptable but collectively, add up to significant project expansion.  Effectively manage the scope and you effectively manage resources and, ultimately, the project.

Think of the project charter as a contract formed with the project stakeholders.  I like to keep the project charter to a single page that can be posted on the wall as a constant reminder of what the project is all about (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Project Charter

The project charter defines the project’s main elements:

• Box 1 – Problem Statement, or definition, and Scope – what areas are included and excluded from the project;
• Box 2 – Quantifiable (SMART) Project Goals, and estimated Benefits and their relationship to business objectives;
• Box 3 – Milestones or Tollgates, and Next Steps; and
• Box 4 – Approvals

Some individuals may include project constraints, budget, risks, resources, assumptions, stakeholders, revision history, funding authority, oversight, project structure, roles & responsibilities, and even a glossary in their charters. Personally, I feel that once you add all of this you have a project plan, not a project charter. You definitely can’t keep something like this to one page if you add all of this.  A charter is an overview: I say, save the details for the project plan (more on that subject next week).

The project charter is the first step in a disciplined project management process.  A project charter assists you in project governance, demonstrates you are following project management best practices, and it’s a great tool to get buy-in from everyone involved.

What Are Some Project Management Tools And Methods?

• Implement a project using the five project management phases;
• Initiate projects with User Requirements & Project Assumptions, a Business Case Justification & Feasibility Study, and a Project Charter & Team Selection.
• Use the project charter (Figure 1) to focus the project team on the key project elements.
• Close out the Project Initiation Phase with a phase review.

Next week, we’ll talk about the second phase of the project management process: Project Planning.

A Project is a temporary collection of related tasks to achieve a desired and usually unique result.

What do you think? Do you find yourself managing a collection of related tasks to achieve a desired result?  If so, you qualify as a project manager.  Businesses today are evolving, downsizing, and pushing more work down the organization chart.  You may be a project manager and not know it.  But what if you haven’t been trained as a Project Manager with the necessary skill and tool sets?

This month, we’re going to talk about the project management process and try to answer some questions that every project manager (or would-be project manager) should have the answer to:

• What is project management?
• What are the five phases of project management?
• What are some project management tools and methods?

What Is Project Management?

Projects are unique events and not processes, yet project management is definitely a process and not a unique event.

Project Management is a disciplined utilization of tools and methods for successfully describing, organizing, and controlling a project.

Project management is a structured process of disciplined actions that follows a common Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle found within the five phases of project management.

What Are the Five Phases of Project Management?

• 1. Project Initiation
• 2. Project Planning
• 3. Project Execution
• 4. Project Monitoring & Control
• 5. Project Review & Close

Figure 1 Project Management Document Map

All projects go through the same five project management phases that typically culminates in some type of project management phase review (see Figure 1, Document Map).  Each project management phase has a distinct purpose, importance, and set of outputs designed to ensure that the project manager is moving the project toward the desired result.

Following a disciplined project management process should help you to eliminate common project issues resulting from poor buy-in, projects consistently going wrong, failing to learn from past project mistakes, or difficulty in getting your projects approved.

Project management begins with the “Project Initiation” phase.  Next week, we’ll  describe this first phase — its purpose, inputs, and outputs — in some detail.  In the following weeks, we’ll explore the remaining phases of project management — planning, execution, monitoring & control, and close & review.

At the heart of your improvement plan should be a strategy.  Rendered maps can help you visually represent that strategy.  You need to paint an attractive picture — show a positive future, show the outcome that people will buy into.

We illustrated a strategy of faster turnaround for aircraft overhauls. It was simple. Workers could easily see how the changes being asked of them would result in good outcomes.

We helped an aircraft overhaul facility, or MRO, cut the time required for major service on aircraft overhauls.  Less time in the shop means operators get their planes back in service faster which, in turn, means they make money instead of spending it.  That helped the aircraft overhaul facility garner a competitive advantage.

We mapped process flows and activities throughout the company; for example, how materials were specified, requisitioned, and tracked.  With our process maps, the client saw how small changes would flow through the system and have a big impact.

Had you asked department managers at the time, they would have told you they were already aware of most of the improvement opportunities that we identified. Certainly, the inefficiencies had been there for years, managers would have said. And point solutions had been identified in some cases.

But the eventual impact of small changes was unclear or unknown, so it was hard for them to justify the time and resources needed to effect change.  So, improvement flagged.

Lighting a fire for change meant we had to change minds.  We illustrated an improvement story that showed certain small changes having a big impact.  Using rendered maps, we illustrated the strategy that was easy to buy into.  We also illustrated a number of systemic improvements that would help sustain the improvements.

Show the Positive Future and Give People a Reason to Change

For example, we selected and illustrated how highly skilled mechanics were spending time and many footsteps getting parts.  Everyone understood that if a wrench doesn’t turn, the plane doesn’t move, and turnaround suffers.

This rendered process map shows mechanics' walk and wait times in the current state. Inefficiency and waste are readily apparent.

In the future state, we instead showed parts being delivered to the mechanics:

In contrast to the current state, the future state is much simpler and, therefore, a marked improvement. As a communications device, it leads workers to ask what is required to achieve and sustain the improvement.

It sounds simple, right?  It was simple, and it tied in with the overall strategy of reducing turnaround.  It made it a great story.  Ultimately, it was the story that had been lacking in the past.

The story, told in rendered maps, helped us get the buy-in that was essential to support the many process changes required to sustain change.  How would the runner know what part to deliver to the mechanic?  When would the  part be delivered?  How would chain of custody be maintained?  Many questions arose that, before, simply froze out improvement, but by telling a story for positive change, the hard work of change became tenable.

By virtue of our illustrating specific improvements, people could see exactly how that lofty strategy translated into their daily work lives.  Our story consisted of sufficient current-state and future-state improvement “concrete steps” and examples to show that improvement was, in fact, possible and exactly how the “positive future” of reduced turnaround time could be achieved.

Telling the Improvement Story Is Part of Your Job

Had we stopped at producing the descriptive maps and left it up to the department heads to structure an improvement program, they surely would have made some incremental improvements in their system.  However, their efforts would have lacked urgency and sustainability.  Change would not have happened fast enough to outpace the industry.  Hungry competitors would not have been overtaken, and no sustainable competitive advantage would have been achieved.

But it was achieved.  As we learned, it’s part of our job as leaders to tell the improvement story. Rendered maps are a tool for telling stories of positive change. Fact-based, tangible, visual stories can illustrate a positive future, and should be in your process mapping toolkit. So, tell the story. Complete the improvement journey. Use a map.

Go Beyond Customer Surveys and Complaints

These methods can provide useful information, but they also have serious limitations when it comes to capturing what customers really want.  It can take a lot of effort to truly understand the meaning behind survey responses and complaints.

Being proactive in hearing, and most importantly, understanding the voice of the customer means more than just having customers complete surveys and then compile results.  It can take more than statistics to really understand what customers want or mean.

Let’s review a couple of well-known examples of how taking time to understand the meaning behind complaints and feedback can lead to simple solutions that have a dramatic impact on customer satisfaction.

Are Expected Complaints Acceptable?

Most of us have been to large amusement parks and had to wait in long lines for rides.  One well-known amusement park carefully monitored customer feedback, and the most frequent complaint was the long wait for rides.  This complaint was ignored for a long time, however, because it was expected that people would complain about lines and because there didn’t seem to be a reasonable solution.  Building duplicate rides to reduce waiting times wasn’t feasible.  Making the ride operation more efficient had limitations and a minimal impact on waiting times.

Eventually, however, a more in-depth investigation into this common complaint was conducted.  It involved asking follow-up questions in order to understand what people didn’t like about the wait.  After all, if people expect to wait in line for rides, why would they complain about it?  So as interviewers tried to determine why people complained about waiting in line, they discovered it wasn’t so much the wait that people didn’t like.  It seemed that people were most bothered by having no idea how long they would have to wait when they joined the queue.  They did not know if it would take 30 minutes or two hours.  Apparently, it was the lack of information about the wait that they didn’t like.

When the amusement park added signs along the queue informing people how long they would have to wait, complaints about waiting in line dropped significantly.  It seems that by having that information, people felt less helpless about the wait, plus they could decide when they arrived at the end of the line if they wanted to wait or go do something else.   Now these waiting time signs are common at most large amusements parks.

Having this information also allowed the parks to “under-promise and over-deliver” as they made extremely conservative estimates about the wait.  Having to wait 45 minutes instead of an hour (as the sign indicated) exceeded the customer’s expectations.

What Are Customers Really Complaining About?

In another case that involves looking for meaning behind the voice of the customer, a developer built a tall skyscraper.  As the project was completed and tenants were moving in, the developer collected feedback from the tenants about the building before closing out the contracts with the various contractors.  He wanted to make sure everything was done properly to satisfactorily meet the tenants’ needs.

After completing an extensive survey of tenants, he was surprised to find one of the most common complaints was slow elevators.  The developer in turn complained to the elevator company.  The elevator company provided the developer with timing statistics to demonstrate that the elevators weren’t really slower than other elevators, but the developer wasn’t convinced.  Eventually the elevator company made some minor adjustments that increased the elevator speed a small degree.

A follow-up survey, however, demonstrated no change.  People still complained about the slow elevators.  The developer began to insist on major, expensive upgrades to the elevator system to make them operate significantly faster.  The elevator company lobbied for some time to study the problem.  They knew their elevators didn’t operate any more slowly than elevators in other buildings, so there must be something else involved.

Observing Customers in Action Provides Important Information

The elevator company hired a behavioral scientist to study the problem.  The behavioral scientist spent a few days at the building riding the elevators and observing people.  The conclusion reached after carefully observing body language, facial expressions, and other behavior was that people were very bored when waiting for and riding on the elevators.  The tenants didn’t seem to realize that they were bored; they just knew it seemed to take forever for elevators to arrive and to deliver them to their desired floor.  So they complained that the elevators were slow.

Instead of spending a large sum of money making the elevators go faster, the elevator company spent a little money installing mirrors inside the elevators, and the developer spent a little money decorating the bare and too-generic lobby area around the elevator bank with paintings, plants, and furniture.  These minor changes  kept people more occupied while waiting for and riding the elevators, thus the slow elevator complaints dropped drastically.

Apparently the behavioral scientist was right.  There was no problem with the elevator speed.  The problem was that the lobby and the elevators were boring, and people were bored when using them.  Being bored made the time drag, thus the “too slow” complaint.

Surveys and Complaints Are Only a Starting Point for Hearing the Voice of the Customer

Not all customer feedback and complaints have hidden meanings.  But they might.  If you take all your customer feedback at face value you could be missing opportunities for breakthrough improvement, or you could invest time and money to fix problems that don’t really exist.

As last week’s article suggests, sometimes you have to find proactive and inventive methods to find out how customers really feel about your product or service.  That might be creating opportunities to rephrase and repeat questions to get a more complete or in-depth picture.  It might be creating opportunities to observe customer behavior and activities.  What works best will depend on the type of organization, the type of customer, and the type of product or service.

You might have opportunities for such activities now.  Is there a recurring complaint you don’t know how to solve?  Are you baffled by particular complaints? (Why would they complain about that?)  These are opportunities to investigate meaning and expand knowledge about the voice of the customer.  A understanding customers is crucial to success and growth.

How do you ensure your company doesn’t fall prey to the hype or the financial crisis and actually maintains — or even grows! — during this economic downturn? How can you use this time to focus and develop more sustainable customer relationships to increase your customer satisfaction or customer quality?

Those very questions are what our new article series at Bizmanualz aims to answer. We have created new Strategic Growth Web pages and article sections not only to help your company grow despite the economic downturn, but to help you grow strategically so that you can maintain that growth in an uncertain future.

So what can you do to ensure your company stays on top and pursues the right opportunities?

The areas of operational improvement we will be rolling out in several articles over the next months include: Quality Management, Value Proposition, Lead Generation and Quality Training. These are tools you need to grow.

Quality Management can mean a variety of things, but it centers on achieving your vision for your company. What is your growth strategy for your company, and what tools do you have in place to get there? Quality Management can start right now with a Gap Analysis to show you the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Your improvement process can be formal, such as implementing an ISO Quality Management System. Or it can be informal and start with whatever elements you have already identified for operational improvement.

The benchmark for all operational improvement should be customer quality, which comes from discovering your Value Proposition. A Value Proposition is simply a statement that captures the customers’ perception of what your company does that they value. What makes you unique among your competitors? Understanding customers’ perceptions of your company—and aligning your strategy to meet those perceptions—will lead to increased customer quality, the ultimate goal for any company.

Once you have established a Quality Management System and sharpened your understanding of your customers, what is left? Well, all that improvement should lead to increased sales and increased profit. That’s where Lead Generation comes in. You don’t want to waste time cold calling and selling to people who don’t want or need your products. Lead Generation uses what you have learned about your customer to create highly focused, customer-centric, often visual marketing campaigns. Creating a website with the right message—and proactively getting that message into your customers’ hands—means they will come to you, not vice versa.

So now you have established operational improvement, you have increased customer quality, and you are selling more. How do you make sure your company continues running at a high level? Quality Training enables continuous improvement throughout your company so that all of your employees are equipped to work smarter, reduce waste, and work more closely with customers. Regular Quality Training leads to an empowered workforce, buy-in across all levels, and continual improvement.

Over the next few weeks we’ll examine these topics in more depth and also offer advice on how to establish and maintain strategic growth using these tools, regardless of the current economic situation.

If you have any questions about any of these services, please contact us or visit our new Strategic Growth Services pages.

How effective are procedures that languish in file drawers or collect dust in binders… never used or seeing the light of day? What is the point of having procedures like these? We have talked in the past about why you need procedures, now let’s talk about how to get those procedures used.

Avoid Poorly Written Procedures

One reason procedures are not used in organizations is because they are poorly written: too long, too confusing, too unorganized, too inconsistent. Hiring or developing a central internal resource with expertise in technical writing and/or developing procedures is a key facet to creating or updating procedures that are readable, useable, and accurate. With an expert or expert staff serving as a base for operational documentation like procedures, and using the process owners and experts as a key resource, the result will be a more consistent, professional output.

Read more about Avoiding Poorly Written Procedures.

Training and Auditing Creates Awareness of Procedures

Once the issue of properly writing procedures is addressed, the next step to ensuring procedures are used is through clear communication to all the affected departments and processes. Procedures should not fall from the sky, arriving to the department along with a stack of other interdepartmental memos, documents and correspondence. Prior or in conjunction to a procedure being released, training should be create awareness of the procedures and explain why it is needed. Follow up audits re-enforce and emphasis the importance of the procedure being followed, as well as identify areas for correction or improvement for the procedure.

Read more about encouraging the use of procedures.

Gaining Buy-In for Procedures

What do we mean by buy-in? Basically, buy-in is getting people to believe. In the context of procedures, buy-in is getting people to believe that having, following, and maintaining procedures is good and important for the organization as well as for their department and them individually.

If they believe the procedure is necessary and helpful, as opposed to just another pointless and burdensome exercise in bureaucratic futility, then the odds of them accepting the procedure as part of their work life will be exponentially enhanced.

Read more about gaining buy-in for procedures.

Management Commitment: The Key to Getting Procedures Used

Properly written procedures, clear communication through training and auditing, gaining buy-in. It takes all of these things for procedures to take root and be considered by the staff as key organizational documents. What is the common link between all these things? Management commitment. Management assigns and allocates the resources in an organization. Without a commitment from management to invest in writing resources, clear communication, and gaining buy-in, there is a good chance that procedures will continued to be ignored; leading to inconsistent process results and potential loss of organizational knowledge.

Read more about the importance of management commitment for procedures.

On That Note

Answer to this month’s question: Procedures can play a important role in an organization, but not if they are unknown, not understood, or generally ignored. If your organization is going to take the time to develop procedures, it should try to understand the role they want procedrues to play, and then work toward developing procedures that fill that role. In any case, however, procedures can not succeed if they are not well written and without proper communication and management commitment.

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It Takes Writing, Training, and Auditing

We have discussed several ways to make sure procedures are used. First is to make the required effort to write good procedures. Without investing in the resources to develop well organized and clearly written procedures it is unlikely they will be used. The next step is to conduct the necessary training. Training creates awareness of the procedure and generates buy-in. Proper training means the staff knows the procedures exist, they understand why, and believe having the procedure is useful.

Finally, when training is followed up and re-enforced with auditing, then you greatly increase the odds that the procedure will be regularly referenced to and followed. Auditing generates a feeling of importance and attention associated with the procedures. It eliminates the perception that procedures are worthless, bureaucratic documents that should be ignored.

It is the total or summation of these important components that gets procedures used. Just doing one or the other doesn’t guarantee success. There is one vital, over-arching component, however, that links these activities together and is the key to making them happen: management commitment. Management assigns and allocates the resources in an organization; how the organization spends its time and money.

The Focus of Management is the Focus of the Organization

Generally management in an organization makes the decisions about how people spend their time, and how many people will be spending their time on particular activities. These are both somewhat related to money,of course, but by money we are typically referring to purchasing things like equipment or to bringing in outside resources like consultants, trainers, or technical writers.

Management commitment is not only assigning resources. The priorities of an organization are really determined by how management itself spends its time. If management spends most of its time focusing on financial aspects of an organization while spending little or no time focusing on an organization’s internal processes (where procedures fit in), then where do you think the members of the organization will focus?

This returns to the idea of a balanced scorecard. According to the concept of a balanced scorecard, management should pay attention to four major things in a balanced way: customers, finances, learning and growth (of organization members), and internal processes. If an organization is going to be successful at writing and implementing procedures, then there has to be a management focus in this area. Management delegating it down and then ignoring it leads to what happens too frequently in many organizations: poorly written procedures that are neglected.

So now the ultimate answer to the great mystery of how to get procedures used is revealed. We know that it is important to write procedure so that they are clear and accessible. It is important to conduct training to create awareness and buy-in. Auditing is a key follow-up activity that re-enforces the importance of following procedures. What makes all of these things happen, however, is a commitment from management.

Get People to Believe

What do we mean by buy-in? Basically, buy-in is getting people to believe. In the context of procedures, buy-in is getting people to believe that having, following, and maintaining procedures is good and important for the organization as well as for their department and them individually.

If they believe the procedure is necessary and helpful, as opposed to just another pointless and burdensome exercise in bureaucratic futility, then the odds of them accepting the procedure as part of their work life will be exponentially enhanced.

As noted in the previous essay, clear communication and training are part of gaining acceptance. Too often documents like procedures fall from the sky with little explanation, and then organizational leaders wonder about the lack of awareness or commitment to following procedures.

We know that explaining why the procedure is necessary is one part of gaining acceptance. Getting buy-in is a key facet of communication about the procedure.

The Formula for Gaining Buy-In

As mentioned above, buy-in is about getting people to believe. Another way to think of buy-in, however, is gaining their understanding, commitment, and action in support of a goal. Dictating actions may work in the short term, but it will rarely result in long term change. As soon as the attention or spotlight is elsewhere, they will return to their old ways of doing things. Long term change happens when people believe in it.

There is a basic formula that can at least be a starting point for gaining buy-in:

Dissatisfaction + Vision + First Steps > Resistance to Change

When you overcome resistance to change, then you have conquered a very big obstacle – they are willing to embrace something different, and that goes against the nature of most us.

Identifying Dissatisfaction Takes Effort

We have mentioned the importance of explaining why procedures are needed. One element of the “why” should be how the procedure is going to help solve some of their problems. For example, with a documented process there should be less doubt and confusion. A clear, defined path is written down for them. Finding and using dissatisfaction, however, is very situational. You have to put in the effort of talking, and especially listening, to people in order to understand what they are dissatisfied about. Then you have figure out the role of a procedure in resolving it.

The Importance of Vision

One reason we fear change is that it means the future is less certain. Uncertainty leads to stress and confusion. What we are currently doing is familiar and comfortable. Changes take these comforting elements away. Expressing a clear vision of a positive future is an important element of buy-in.

A vision of a positive future must include a positive future for everyone. For example, streamlining a process in a way that leads to cuts in staff is not expressing a positive future for those potentially facing pink slips. Express a positive vision for only a select few and your effort to gain buy-in will certainly fail. A vision, however, of a growing, successful organization that is inclusive and provides opportunities for advancement is another story.

Okay. But What Am I Supposed to Do?

A vision without first steps usually leads to frustration. Talking about a glorious future without any concrete details of what you want them to do can leave people bewildered and anxious. On the other hand, laying out lengthy, detailed plans for the long term can be overwhelming, so they end up doing nothing. The idea is to tell them what they need to do today, tomorrow, and next week without confusing them with too many details about next year or five years from now. They need to know some concrete first steps they should take.

Conversely, first steps without a clear vision usually leads to false starts and flavor of the months programs that end up leaving the staff discouraged and wary of change.

Explaining why is important, but just as important is getting them to believe your explanation. That is why buy-in is so important.

This week we will address the second category of procedure problems: when they are not used or not followed. There are a lot of reasons procedures are not used or are not followed. They include things such as: the staff is not aware of them, they don’t know where to find them, or the procedures are so out of date or inaccurate that they are simply ignored. Of course, before tackling this issue, the first step is to make sure the issues related to writing procedures are addressed. Can you really blame people for not following a hopelessly flawed procedure?

Use Training for Awareness and Buy-In

One way to find a solution to the problem of procedures not being used is to think about how procedures are released. Does the release process include communication to all the affected departments and processes? Communication doesn’t mean the procedure falls from the sky and arrives at the department along with a stack of other interdepartmental memos, documents and correspondence.

The release of newly developed or revised procedures should be accompanied by training that clearly explains why procedures are needed, why they were written, and why they should be used and followed. Having all the affected staff attend training directed at achieving those goals obviously creates an awareness of it. Attendees now know what it is called, its nomenclature (document number), what it looks like, what’s in it, and how to find it.

But let’s not gloss over all these “whys” too quickly. Answering these questions in a clear and straightforward way is the key to getting buy-in. And buy-in is what is really needed to make the idea of using the procedures stick. If you, however, as the compliance manager, department head, or process owner, do not have all the answers to these “why” questions, then the real question is – why was the procedure written in first place?

Too Many Procedures!

Another reason procedures may not be used is that there are just too many of them. An organization’s world of procedures may be a confusing maze some are unable to navigate and make sense of. Figuring out what procedures are truly needed (and why) and eliminating the rest can reduce confusion and complexity, and lead to procedures being better used and followed. Taking a lean approach to procedures in conjunction with other methods of communicating organizational knowledge (like training) can make a big difference not only in how people use procedures, but also their attitude toward them.

Schedule Audits to Ensure Procedures Are Used

After training creates awareness and buy-in, the next step is follow-up with auditing. Here auditing refers to observing compliance to the process documentation (the procedure). How is the process conducted? Does it match the procedure? Are people aware of the procedure and whether or not it is followed? Hopefully, the audit will find that the procedure is being followed, but if it does not then an analysis should follow to determine why. As always, the focus should be on determining where corrections need to be made in the system, and not on blaming individuals.

In any case, if issues are found with the procedure (with awareness, correctness, etc;) during the audit, corrective action is taken and a follow up audit scheduled for the not too distant future. Ignoring the problem will not likely lead to a solution.

Training and auditing. These are the keys to having procedures used and followed. Start with training to ensure the proper awareness and buy-in, and then follow-up with auditing to reinforce the importance of using the procedure.

The REAL Problem with Procedures

Now we have covered both of the major categories of “procedure problems.” While we separated procedure issues into two categories of solutions, the solution to procedure problems always comes from one place: management. The level of management’s commitment and involvement will almost always be the determining factor in how effectively procedures are developed and then employed. It is management’s responsibility to put resources in place to write good procedures, and it is management’s responsibility to put the resources in place to conduct training and auditing. Without the proper resources, it is difficult for procedure projects to succeed.

So if you are in management, and you wonder why people in your organization aren’t very good at writing or using procedures, now you know where the problem lies. If you are not part of management, then the next time you hear a top manager railing about problems with procedures;.well;try to keep a straight face.