Every business is different, and yet at their core they will contain the same handful of workflows. By mapping out these workflows you can find bottlenecks in your business (people or time) – and troubleshoot ways to fix them.
What are these core workflows? A business needs customers and to get customers you need to make sales. What does that sales process look like? If you were to map it out in a workflow, how many people are involved and what steps are required?
Those customers (hopefully) make payments. What does the workflow look like for your accounts, from sending the invoice, following up with the customer, receiving the money and updating your accounting program?
And how do you deliver the product or service bought by each customer? The series of actions to take the request and deliver the order can be recorded as a workflow for each item.
Longer workflows can be split into phases. A web design agency can go through five phases in the process of building a client’s website – preparation, planning, graphic design, build, review.
A courier company might use only two phases to describe its service – collection and delivery.
So regardless of your type of business, here are at least three workflows with which you can experiment.
There are all sorts of dedicated, sometimes expensive programs for creating workflows. Most are aimed at people who design workflows as a key part of their profession.
A better starting point is to use the tools you have available. A cheap and easy option is presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Keynote (for Macs).
PowerPoint has an advantage as it not only has arrows, ovals and boxes but SmartArt diagrams under the Processes menu.
Choosing a process pops up a workflow chart where you can type in all the required steps. The process diagram will adjust as you add more steps.
Some steps in a workflow will depend on a previous step being completed first. You need to email an invoice to a customer before they will pay it. A workflow can make the next step conditional on earlier steps.
Here’s a step by step guide to using SmartArt processes in PowerPoint to create a basic workflow.
Take 15 minutes to knock up three workflows for your business. Once you can see the whole process on one page you might notice steps that take too long, can be outsourced or eliminated altogether.
Ok, enough with the generalities. Next week we will look at the workflows in an accounting firm to see how this works in practice.
This post is part of the Optimise Your Business stream in the Future of Work series sponsored by Salesforce.com.
Image credit: FastCoDesign