[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. This is what Counts, a podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. And we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management.
This is Lee, and in this episode, more and I will get further into our framework where the devil is in the details when it comes to the process.
Oh, my gosh. More. A process, really? And the details and the devils that are. That are in the process.
This, I mean, just, it could start from A and go all the way to Z, let's put it that way. That's how many problems there could be in processes.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: 99 problems and processes.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: All of them. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So anyway, how would you like to start this one?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Let's start with the definition of process.
So at its simplest, process is how you get things done.
But what I have found, and I think, I hope you would agree with me, but maybe not. When we start talking about business process and processes around managing information, I often find that the first response we get from some of our clients is everything is special. We don't have a process.
It all depends. It all depends. And so then they kind of despair over the ability to ever break down the process and actually talk about the steps. Would you agree that that happens?
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Well, I would agree that every client thinks that they're very special. That's for sure. That's the first thing. And then some people have, they, they know there's a process. They just definitely don't have it defined, let's put it that way, or written down anywhere.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Yes. I want to say that I think all of our clients are also special.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: We do like working with them and they are.
They bring some richness to our lives.
But the, the challenge I see is when there are a lot of variables and a lot of pressure on. We need to get something done. We need to get something done. And I think the first, the kind of instinctive reaction is if you try and make me follow a process, then I. Then it's going to slow me down. And that just because I think people might equate. This is kind of the feeling I've been getting from all the feedback that we get from our clients over the years is if you have to follow the process, then it's a bunch of red tape. It's a bunch of hoops to jump through. And therefore it's Going to be slow. And honestly, outside of work, I would say that actually my mother felt the same way about process.
Just to take it to a personal, to a completely different out of the, the client arena.
You see where you are. Everybody knows where they're starting from. You know where you want to get. You know what your outcome, you know your desired outcome is.
And then you have. You do think, I think everyone does consider, okay, how do I get from here to there is it, I want to buy something for a business, I want to buy something for my business. I know that I need to buy this thing, but how do I get it done? Can I put it on my corporate credit card? Can I put it on my personal credit card and expense it?
And there are limits, the company has limits to what you're allowed to do with those things. Most companies do and some companies have policies against ever using a personal credit card and being reimbursed.
They might have policies against buying something over a certain dollar amount on a credit card, no matter what, because they have a requirement to do a comparison of three prices, three sources, something like that.
We've seen variations on those themes. So harking back to our policy episode from before, those policies impact your process because if you're allowed to do something, then you're going to take the shortest number of steps to get to the end. But if there are rules about how you need to do it, you're going to have to do some more steps.
That's one, that's one way that people, that people's thought processes impact their processes. The other way is you're trying to do something big. So you have to get something to be approved. You have to pull together different people. You might have a document and a lot of people have a stake in how this document turns out. And a lot of people need to weigh in on the exact wording or the terms of a contract or the conditions that something is going to take place. Or when we were working for government agencies, it was how did the regulation, how was it stated? Or like we talked about last week, how does your, how does a policy get approved? Policies getting approved are, is a process because you, everybody can't just put a policy out in your company. They'll, they won't, they'll conflict all over the place. And if you don't have a clear process, then you're going to end up with a problem when you come to conflicting policies, both equally legitimate based on the people who put them out there, but they clash.
So even though I think the Instinct is process equals red tape equals slowing me down. In fact, when you start to talk to people about, well, okay, you need to get this contract in place quickly because the deal is waiting. Got it. But if you don't agree the terms, then the deal might have issues. So you have to get through the terms. Now, are there ways to speed that up? Sure. You could have standard terms and approved deviations or variances. You could have standard terms and approve no variances. That's where your policy can work with your process. Because here's our standard terms. All we have to do is churn this out with the new party names in it and send it over for signature.
But if it has to be all negotiated, then you might have. The commercial team is starting the process and they are agreeing on commercial terms, but the legal team or the risk team has a stake in it to protect the company, to make sure that the commercial terms aren't going to put the company at risk in some way. We saw at a previous client where the commercial teams were making deals and making agreements around around a service that this company was offering and they weren't consulting the team that had to provide the service. And the team that had to provide the service was coming in after the fact and saying, holy cow, how are we going to get this done? Like, what did you agree to this for? So it's even beyond the legal and the risk people weighing in and trying to protect the company. You want to include the other parts of your business that are impacted so that they are able to deliver what your commercial team has promised.
So in that case, a process where, you know, these are the six people that need to weigh in, or the six teams that we need to weigh in, or these are the three teams we always have to have. And if this term is invoked, then we need to pull this team in, or if this thing changes, then we need to pull this team in, or whatever the variations are. Thinking it through in advance actually makes your process run faster.
But that's kind of counterintuitive. When you first start talking to people and then once you get them through that concept, the breaking it down and the writing down every single step and every single decision point and what the options are, it's tedious. And that's where we get to the devils in the details around process.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: I thought you were going to say that you should move the engineering folks into that initial meeting.
It's kind of an inside joke. But the idea there is just what you said. Have everybody in the initial meeting, pull them in early so that they're aware of what is going to happen and they can handle what's going to happen along, along down the line of the process.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: You could do that. That's an approach if you want to do that for every single deal. If they're big enough deals, it's worth it. If the timeline is long enough, it's worth it. But I think that doing some work on scoping out what the general parameters are and who needs to weigh in is, is going to streamline things once you start rolling. Because these deals are not one offs. These deals happen all the time. And now you've got the input already and you know where you, where you hit a point where you're like, okay, this is too far off from what we've all agreed. Now we need to go pull them in again.
And everyone agrees that that's the plan. So that's.
So that's where I think that spending the time on the details of the process, doing the tedious work of breaking it down step by step, decision by decision, option by option is important and it gives you a better result at the end. And it's why process is one of the key pillars in our framework. Because we talk a lot about over the course of these podcasts. I think we've talked about podcast episodes. I think I have talked about how records management, information governance is about the relationship that your team has with its information.
How do you create it, how do you use it, how do you find it, how does your business use it? And process is the mechanism that it's like the structure for that relationship. It's a guideline for it. How do you. Because it helps provide context for why this information is being created. Why is this information important?
So the details in the process, even though at first glance everybody, everybody feels like, no, don't talk to me about that. It's too hard, it's going to slow me down. I don't have time for that. In fact, I think the payoff is huge.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: That's reasonable and I think that works for me. Do you have anything else to add?
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Nope. I mean, if we wanted to go farther, it's all about how to do the process mapping. That's a whole different series of episodes. We'll get to that later, so.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Or we can refer to our records process mapping episode that we did a long time ago.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Yes, we can.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: If you have any questions, please send us an email at
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. Thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake created our music.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Thanks everyone.
