Fundamentals of work cycle management

Any business’s ability to plan strategically and run efficiently depends on its workflow management. Let’s examine these two crucial facets of the process in more detail: workflow comprehension and process identification.

Recognizing workflows

A workflow is essentially a series of actions or processes necessary to complete a certain task or reach a particular business objective. These procedures can be as easy as processing an order from a consumer or as complicated as creating a brand-new good or service. Workflow management requires a deep understanding of each phase, the individuals involved, the resources required, and the desired outcome. By getting rid of redundant information and inefficiencies, optimizing these procedures not only expedites work but also raises quality and lowers expenses.

Identifying key processes

Prior to beginning any optimization, you should determine which workflows are critical to your company. Key processes are those that are absolutely necessary for your firm to succeed. They may include:

• Procedures that directly affect customer satisfaction include order fulfilment speed and effectiveness as well as customer service protocols. Enhancing these procedures will immediately boost client satisfaction and loyalty to your goods and services.
• Processes that use a significant portion of resources: These could be procedures related to inventory control or manufacturing that need a lot of labor and materials. By streamlining these procedures, expenses can be greatly decreased and overall company productivity can be raised.
• Processes with strategic importance: These processes include those that affect the long-term development and competitiveness of the company, such as research and development, strategic planning and innovation processes.

Techniques for streamlining workflow

Utilising workflow optimisation strategies is crucial to increasing modern businesses’ productivity and competitiveness. The main areas of such optimization include process automation, improved communication within teams, and monitoring with process analysis. Let’s take a closer look at each of these strategies.

Procedure Synchronisation

Process automation is the implementation of technology to simplify and speed up work tasks, minimize manual labor and reduce the potential for errors. This is achieved through the use of specialized software and systems that take over routine tasks.

Automation instruments:

CRM systems: By automating the processes of gathering customer information, communicating with customers, and evaluating their preferences, you may assist in managing customer relationships.

Methods of Project Management: Provide project planning, tracking, and oversight by automating task assignment, time tracking, and reporting.

Marketing Automation: Instruments that automate marketing campaigns, analyze advertising effectiveness, manage content, and interact with potential customers.

Improved communication

In a team, efficient communication is essential for sharing ideas, coordinating tasks, and quickly resolving issues. The use of contemporary digital tools can greatly enhance communication procedures.

Digital platforms for communication:

• Messengers and enterprise social networks: Enable instant messaging, file sharing and the exchange of important information between employees.
• Systems for managing tasks: Enable efficient task assignment, tracking and sharing of real-time updates.

Monitor and analyze processes

Understanding how your processes are working and where problems may be occurring is key to continually optimizing them. Process data tracking and analysis can be used to identify inefficiencies and possible areas for improvement.

Analytics tools:

• Analytics and reporting systems: Combine information from several sources to give a complete view of the process’ effectiveness. This enables you to make defensible conclusions grounded upon empirical data analysis.
• Process monitoring tools: Specialized software to track tasks and processes in real time, helping you respond quickly to problems and make adjustments.

Practical tips for optimization

Streamlining and streamlining workflows, it’s important to not only take strategic approaches, but also implement practical tips that can be implemented at every level of your organization. Here is a detailed explanation of some of the most effective practices:

Process Mapping

Process mapping is the process of putting workflows into a visual representation in order to see where bottlenecks and redundancies are, as well as where improvements may be made. With this technique, you can:

• Make a graphic that illustrates every stage of the process, from beginning to end, together with the people in charge of executing the duties, to help you visualise the procedures involved.
• Examine data flows to find out how materials and information are transferred across processes in order to spot any inefficiencies or potential delays.
• Streamline procedures: Utilise the map to pinpoint actions that can be automated, made simpler, or removed completely.

Establishing KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure the effectiveness of a process and serve as a basis for process modification and improvement. At every level of management, the appropriate KPIs can serve as a roadmap for making decisions.

• Choose the measurements that most accurately reflect your company’s success in reaching its objectives after deciding what matters most to it.
• To make them easy to understand and apply in operational decision-making, KPIs should be precise, quantifiable, and timely.
• Review and modify KPIs frequently to reflect changes in the market and business environment.

Employee training and development

Employee development and their adaptation to new tools and work methodologies are key to successfully implementing changes in work processes.

• Provide training courses that concentrate on the particular abilities and know-how required to operate with new equipment or in modified procedures.
• Provide access to online resources and courses, and encourage independent study.
• Create a mentoring programme so that seasoned workers can assist less experienced staff members in learning new technologies.

An ongoing improvement culture

The basis for workflow improvement and continuous development is establishing an environment where each employee feels involved in the process and has the chance to make suggestions for improvement.

• Encourage staff members at all levels to take initiative and be receptive to new ideas.
• Call frequent meetings to go over suggestions for improvements and provide updates on the state of process optimisation.
• Implement feedback mechanisms so that employees can see how their contributions contribute to the overall success of the company.

In summary

Rather than being a one-time occurrence, workflow management is an ongoing process. It takes constant attention to detail, a commitment to innovation, and a readiness to adapt for your organisation to operate at its best. Your workflows will become much more efficient with the help of the methods and tips provided, which will raise your company’s profitability and competitiveness in the market.

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And it doesn’t matter what you know – things are bad, asshole, need to tighten your belts and fuck up, or things are good, some huge projects came in (and need to fuck up too). You shouldn’t think that everyone shares your fears or your joy.

When you start out with a super micro business, you go that way:

I’m the only one doing everything, and of course I know everything about everything.

There are 2-3 of us, we sit at the same table, and of course we know everything about everything

There are 5-7 of us, we sit in the same office, we discuss every problem, every client call, we hear each other. And of course we know everything about everything.

Then at some point, booms happen. And we sit in 2-3 separate offices, saying hello in the morning and goodbye going home in the evening. We cross paths sometimes in the kitchen, or in the evening over pizza after work. In fact, information is already lost. But it’s not a disaster yet.

When I understood this simple truth, I began to implement tools to get back closer to each other. With the right (!) organization synchronizations take minimum time and give maximum benefit.

We are now regularly distributing information:

The current situation in the company by areas of activity – figures, facts, news, innovations, changes. Every week planner + every month a written digest.

Mission, values, long-term strategy and tactical plans, where the company is going and why. As the news comes out.

Problems of any nature (deal with the range of persons who may be affected by the solution of these problems).

Block-by-block coordination (finances once a week, projects once a week, resource planning once a week + adjustments, sales once a week + daily operatives)

Every time I think “geez, what didn’t they do the way I expected” – I wonder if they knew something had to be done? Did they understand that there was any situation, any tension at all? Could they have done “right” and “as I expected”?

More often than not, the answer is NO. Because information needs to be told )

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This “managerial revelation” applies entirely to the organization of regular company meetings.

When we conduct org changes at a client, including diving into how the planning meetings are set up, and telling them how we do it. We keep it simple:

Monday, 10:00 a.m. Directional sales planner, review of leads and deals, plan for the week

Wednesday, 10:00 a.m. Financial coordination.

Friday, 10:00 a.m. General Staff.

Friday, 11:00 a.m. Governing Board

It didn’t take us all that long to get started. When I think back to our first weekly meetings, it’s embarrassing. One is sitting with his laptop, texting with someone. The other goes out every three minutes on the phone. No goals. A bunch of people who I don’t know why they came here, just sit around, yawning. It’s creepy.

And very often customers say that they do not work. Trying to enter at least one regular meeting, but nothing: then one did not come, then another, the director of the situation – missed, then all the “in the phones sitting.

The main mistake in the introduction of regular procedures – do not maintain order at first, until the order began to maintain itself.

Resolved to meet on Fridays, review the results of the week and agree on a plan for the next week? Great.

Clearly fix the day and time. The composition of participants – only those people who are really needed here. And not one extra person who doesn’t benefit from the topic of the meeting.

Always show up at that day and time yourself. Require others to plan their business so that they are always here at this time and on this day.

Concentrate on the purpose of the meeting, lead the meeting. Don’t get distracted. Don’t let others get distracted, sit on their phones, etc.

Repeat once a week) Every week) at the same time.

In 2-3 months, people will gather on their own on that day, and be ready.

Because first you maintain order, and then order maintains you.

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We set a group of goals. Well here’s a billion in 2025, decomposed into areas of “at the expense of what.” If we are honest with ourselves (and this is a separate effort), it has become clear that this billion is:

1. Other projects with different types of clients
2. Performed with other technologies.
3. Other expertise (sold for other money)
4. Multiple times higher productivity (for the company as a whole)
5. New quality of services
6. New products and services

…And also, of course, a different management, different accounting… the entire back office needs to be shaken up to make it ready. In short – a billion in revenue, it’s just another Corada company. In which other projects are done by other people, managed by professional executives. I wouldn’t rule out a different CEO (professional, not me).

And if “New Products and Services” is something you have to come up with, invest time and money, then 1-5 items are the masthead right now. A base without which it’s impossible to grow even a little bit. You have to move on all of these axes (choosing 1 key direction for each period, and concentrating on it).

In order to realize all of this, it is necessary to change a lot inside from the beginning. And to change without stopping the technological process, doing projects, providing services, earning money.

Very briefly, we need to:

Standardize everything we do so that quality is constant (not below an acceptable level defined by us) regardless of RP and other team members, and it can be managed. And constantly improve that quality (as bequeathed to us by ISO9001:2015)

To learn to count a lot of leading indicators, and lagging (at least) too.

Significantly change the level of internal automation.

Change personnel policies. Change the people who don’t deliver results to people who deliver results. Either by training … or alas replacement.

All changes are painful. But changes in people are the most painful for me.

It’s very easy to say.
“You just have to calculate the effectiveness of people, if person A does not give the required result, and we are not ready to teach him, for example, half a year, or we do not know how to do it, we need to replace him with person B, who can give that result immediately.”

And it’s very difficult to accomplish that. So somewhere along the way to a billion, I will remain a strategist, an inspirer, and an ideologue, but I will not run Corada. It’s hard for me to break up with people, they become “Corada family” to me and all that. In general, I’m tired in the last month, here )

In general, I started writing this text, in order to come to the thesis that “If you set a big goal, but nothing around you have not changed – most likely you went nowhere, and you continue to do as before.

It’s not really about that, but it’s about that, too.

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Someone in the company is cool, doing a great job and getting results.

He starts breaking company rules for little things – but he is mega-productive, and you go along with him.

The number of such violations increases – because he is productive and brings results. He’s allowed to.

We increase the volume of projects and tasks – as long as the person copes with them, everything is fine.

If he stops coping, there is a simple way: to hire assistants, programmers, give him resources in general.

Unfortunately, all the new people work the same way. And you thought? )

The argument you’ll hear here when trying to stop and get things in order will be “should I work, or should I write plans?”, “which is more important – finishing everything or following the rules?”, and of course “there are clients waiting!”

Unfortunately, working in this mode will lead to problems either on the part of clients who will stop getting work/products on time. Or your mega-productive employee will … burn out. He’ll get tired and quit, yes. Tired of the chaos and responsibility for everything around him, of having everything in his head and everything depending solely on him. People like to work in order, for the most part.
The conclusion is very simple. There can be no alternative to “do you want me to get you there, or do you want me to obey the traffic rules?” The correct answer is “I want to get to the place with traffic rules enforced on the way: leave when I planned and arrive on time.”
If something in your company is going the way of creating “turbidity” stop before it’s too late. The “it’s still working” argument is a very bad one.

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