Focus on the “To-be” process
In yesterdays post, I wrote about responsiveness and efficiency. In the article referenced, there was another gem that I think is an important pimpalicious work tip: focus on the “to-be” process, not on the current process.
If you or your company have already made the decision to change out something, the vast majority of time you spend on documenting the current something is a waste of time and effort. The decision to change has already been made and how the current process works provided all the reasons to make a change.
Instead, focus on how you want the business process to work with the change — the “to-be” process. Most people already know where the problems are in the current process since they’ve been living with the pain all this time anyway.
Spending more time on the solutions gives everyone the opportunity to optimize how the new process should work, build out the right requirements for any systems changes and find any other issues that could cause problems early on in the game.
This is a hard lesson to implement — people naturally like complaining and if it is complaining about the current process, so be it. But, its time to move on. So focus on how to make it all better and don’t live in the past.
Tags: Cube life, General work pimps, GTD, Meeting magic, Staying Sane, Survival Skills, Workplace WellnessRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Cube life, GTD, General work pimps, Meeting magic, Staying Sane, Survival Skills, Workplace Wellness
2 opinions for Focus on the “To-be” process
ann michael
Jan 12, 2020 at 7:48 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more! Hopefully the people we bring together to architect the future process know what they need to accomplish and why. Dwelling on the current process can actually make them more defensive and less willing to consider how it could be done! Great topic!
Scot Herrick
Jan 12, 2020 at 10:44 pm
Hi Ann,
Yes…”Dwelling on the current process can actually make them more defensive…”
I had not mentioned that, but that is a great observation. There is a lot of ego built into the status quo and that makes things harder to change.
By focusing on the “to-be” process, it should help those embedded in the past process be able to focus on how to improve what they are doing.
Nice comment.
Thanks…Scot
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