How to Create Wins with Your Own Repeatable Processes
Highlights
Repeatable processes allow you to build on your successes and get more of those same results.
Helpful strategies to create repeatable processes include thoroughly tracking your wins, collecting feedback, making time for reflection, analyzing failures and successes, and adopting a framework for capturing best practices as they emerge.
Success is wonderful on its own. But if you don’t understand why you’ve achieved a particular business goal then you can’t repeat the steps that led toit — and failing to capture your own repeatable processes and best practices can mean losing out on future opportunities.
It’s easy to see why this happens: Everyone is too busy working toward success to stop and wonder what caused it. Once a goal is met, there may be a brief moment of celebration, and then it’s on to the next goal. Forward focus is a good thing, generally.
But it becomes a problem when effective strategies, tactics, and best practices that your team has developed or discovered during the real-time pursuit of a goal get lost in the shuffle. Putting in the effort ahead of time to cement best-practice capture into your everyday business processes will pay off in repeatable future wins.
Here are five strategies for capturing and creating repeatable processes as they emerge.
1. Track Your Repeatable Processes Thoroughly
Key to Prime 8’s success as a consulting firm is helping our clients create repeatable wins. But you can’t keep winning if you don’t know what led to the win.
Repeatable processes lead to repeatable benefits and wins. Capturing processes helps identify redundancy and waste, define ways to streamline or simplify, and fill gaps in responsibilities, all of which improve your bottom line.
Prime 8 Proverb:
Repeatable processes lead to repeatable wins.
Resistance to capturing and tracking processes is often an issue of time: people don’t have enough of it which means great ideas and best practices often disappear as soon as the win happens. The key to success? Having a predefined mechanism to process, store and share best practices AND requiring everyone to commit to the collective effort of gathering them.
This is where programming the capture of best practices pays off. Whether you document your processes old school with pen and paper or you lean on technology and tools to do the work for you, tracking the way work gets done is important for creating recurring successes.
As an example, we helped one tech client create a framework to boost its sales whose success mostly relied on the expertise of individual sales reps. A new product offering was highly complex and the approach to selling was lacking which made it difficult for prospective clients to see how the product could help them. Prime 8 stepped in and helped the client break down the product story into digestible parts, designed clear messaging and created a prescriptive and repeatable conversation for the sales team that was easier to understand for prospects. Read more on our approach to developing repeatable processes with this client.
2. Collect Feedback from Your Team Members
Communication is crucial to understand why your team achieves or falls short of its goals, but honest, forthcoming communication requires more than just an open-door policy. Research shows that 65% of employees want to hear more feedback from their managers. Four out of 10 employees will disengage from their work if they receive little or no feedback. The most successful leaders are not only open to feedback but actively solicit it.
Employee survey apps can help by anonymizing the process and making it easier for employees to be honest. Group chat boards like those in Slack can give employees the option to weigh in on each other’s feedback.
The more your employees feel like their experience and learnings are relevant to the overall success of the organization, the more invested they’ll be in sharing and creating repeatable processes. Regularly reiterate to team members that their feedback is essential to the team’s overall success (and behave in a way that makes it clear you appreciate their input, even when it’s negative).
3. Build in Time for Structured Reflection
It’s natural to fixate on achieving your organizational goals, but it’s important to look back down at the path you’ve already trod — not only to remind yourself of how far you’ve come, but to assess where you made missteps and where you covered ground most effectively.
One study found that employees who spent 15 minutes reflecting at the end of each work day showed a 23% performance improvement compared to those who spent no time on reflection. Having this time is a key piece of individual learning and development, and it doesn’t take much time to make it effective.
“Reflection is one of the most underused yet powerful tools for success. ”
-Richard Carlson, American author and psychotherapist
Reflection shouldn’t just be ad hoc. Prioritizing it enough to build in time during your team’s regular work schedule will make space for more thoughtful and fruitful analyses.
Some ways to set aside time for work-related reflection include:
Dedicated post mortem meetings at the end of specific projects or time periods
Devoting time to daily stand-ups to discuss what is (and isn’t) working
Focusing on practices worthy of repeating during team member one-on-ones
4. Analyze Failures as Well as Successes
Formalizing failure analysis, commonly used by design engineers, helps you avoid repeatable failure by brittle or broken processes and identify knowledge gaps and blind spots that are holding you back.
If your team is falling short, rather than focusing on the suboptimal results, ask questions about what got you there: What steps did your team members take that were different from previous processes? What did they try that was new — and what did they hold back from trying, out of concern that it was too “out there” or might go wrong?
In addition, having detailed data about what isn’t working can give you something against which to contrast processes that lead to success, which can be helpful when trying to identify what exactly is working better.
5. Adopt a Repeatable Process Framework
If developing your own repeatable processes for capturing best practices seems overwhelming, consider adopting a full project management strategy such as agile methodology. Having the steps and priorities laid out for you in an existing framework can remove overload paralysis and make the process more approachable.
Agile methodologies — the most popular of which include Scrum and Kanban — revolve around 12 main principles that aim to improve communication and collaboration, streamline processes, and maximize the talent of the individuals on your team.
Business success is, in the end, ultimately about repeatability. If you can’t recreate the process that led to achieving your goal, you can’t forecast and plan for growth.
Speak to a Prime 8 Consulting expert to understand how our business operations services enable decision-makers at all levels to obtain insights and answers never before possible.
