Behind the Screen: Process Mapping
As the CEO of your business, have you found yourself to be the bottleneck in accomplishing tasks? Well friend, you are not alone. Often times, the CEO as a bottleneck occurs as a symptom when Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are not in place or out of date. Did you know that an SOP should be created for any tasks that happen more than once in your business? When procedures aren’t clearly documented and readily available for reference, team members have to put more thought and effort into the actions they need to take in order to complete the process and often times rely on questions and answers that they need from the CEO in order to proceed with their work. And therein lies the Bottleneck (EEK)!
Now that you’re aware of the symptom and the diagnosis….you can take action to fix it with the following 5 steps!
Review your SOPs and compare them to your actual processes (see more about this below). Identify any gaps/updates that are required.
Make any necessary changes or create new SOPs if needed.
Test your SOP to make sure you didn’t forget a step or leave out a detail. I recommend having someone that did not write the SOP complete the testing.
Communicate the updates/changes to your team members.
Create a regular schedule for ongoing review of your SOPs.
When I’m working with clients to help them get their processes documented and in order, we begin by mapping out the process flow step-by-step. This includes ensuring that every task is assigned to one single member of the team so that it is clear who is responsible for completing that step in the process. Once we’ve mapped out the process flow, we can create or update the SOP(s) accordingly. We ensure that the SOP is accessible to everyone on the team that plays a role in completing that process so they can refer to it any time. Extra Bonus: Your SOPs also serve as a great tool when training and onboarding new team members thus saving time for the CEO or leaders responsible for training.
If you use a Project Management Tool (which I highly recommend!) tasks from your SOPs can be assigned to team members with due dates to ensure that completion of the tasks within the process are being completed on time. This empowers team members as they now have the information that they need in order to complete the steps in the process (and removes unnecessary questions of the CEO) and gives the CEO/relevant leaders of the business a real-time status update of where things are at related to the completion of the process (by inspecting what you expect!).
I recorded a quick behind the screen video to share how I work through process mapping and the benefits of doing so! If you’re interested in taking action to get rid of that Bottleneck, let’s talk about it!