Is your business people dependent or process and system dependent?

Keeping track of projects, meetings, tasks and conversations without appropriate tools and technologies can be a nightmare. You can either stand tall or spend your life endlessly chasing details, missing appointments, suffer poor business execution and lose information buried in emails that everyone on the team can benefit from.

The challenges collaborating with others within your company and even people outside your company can ultimately undermine your effectiveness and efficiencies.

Quite simply, you are either process and system dependent or people dependent. If you’re process and system dependent, please stop reading now. If you are people dependent, read on.

You may be getting business done today but lack process coherency, communication and efficiencies that you can gain by having processes and systems that align well with your individualized needs. And, as your business grows and evolves, will your processes be robust enough to support your business?

Here are some important questions:

• What if there was a way to implement a technology platform that reflects the way you and your team actually need to work rather than adapting the way you work to a tool that only partially addresses your team’s needs?
• What if these tools and processes not only worked well within your company but allowed you to invite people external to your organization to participate and collaborate with you?
• What if these tools and processes could be customized or personalized for individual teams or work groups without having to go to I.T. for assistance?
• What if this tool cut down on email interactions yet allowed for group interaction easily and transparently?
• What if this tool could allow you to link specific documents to tasks, work groups, deliverables, etc., using a myriad of different document repositories?
• What if these tools and processes allowed you and your team to execute with much greater precision?
• What if these tools and processes ensured you could determine the status of issues that are pertinent to you or your team in just seconds?
• What if these tools and processes could be implemented within a few days, not weeks, months or years?
• What if these tools and processes required a minimal technology investment?

At this point, I hope I have your attention. A typical project follows this sequence:

1. Identification of business process needs and priorities.
2. Define work spaces and specialized applications to support the teams that will be using the work spaces.
3. We sit with your team, get an understanding of your current processes, identify process breakdowns and areas for improvement.
4. We look at your processes, simplify where possible, and examine how the processes fit together.
5. We create the work spaces and processes to align with your individualized process needs.
6. Invite team members to join the work spaces.
7. Configure the work spaces and applications to meet team needs. Team members participate in this process.
8. Training and orientation—business transformation begins—just days after you started!
9. Support change implementation and process improvements.

Without appropriate tools and processes, you do not have the insights you need to manage your business effectively and efficiently. If you can’t monitor your work-in-process, you can’t manage your work-in-process. If you can’t manage your work-in-process, you can’t manage your business.

We can help you close your business execution gaps quickly and efficiently and leave you to use these tools without being reliant on us.

Dave Gardner, Gardner & Associates Consulting http://www.gardnerandassoc.com

© 2012 Dave Gardner