Broken process for product opportunity

Working for more than my share of companies large and small, one commonality I find is that as companies grow their headcount the process must adapt. That seems to be obvious and almost doesn’t need to be said. However, the value in that statement goes beyond the immediate statement and into the implication that follows.

The fact of the matter, is that as a company grows the headcount the process will always adapt and change, but weather or not it adapts properly is a different thing entirely. Increasing head counts provide a business the opportunity to solve operational problems by assigning people to the new tasks as they pop up. This tends to hide operational inefficiencies and make people busy in the time consuming tasks that could be solved in a more scalable way.

I have seen common symptoms of operational process that could be better solved by software. If you see any of these symptoms at your job, this could mean one of two things. First, that there is an innovative software product waiting to be developed. Or, there is software that is already out there that can help make the process more efficient

These are the three biggest symptoms I look for when trying to fix a process:

1. Excel Files

Microsoft Excel is a pretty great program for a lot of reasons, but because of it’s variety of uses, I find that it tends to be used to band-aid operational issues.

• If you find that people are using Excel to copy and paste data often, there is probably something that needs to be fixed. Data should not need to be extracted and input into systems via copy / paste. This is slow, cumbersome, not scalable and most importantly has a high chance of user error. Data integrity is something that is important to software and every time people have to manually manipulate the data, the integrity is compromised. Systems should talk to systems, to solve this the magic word might be web services or possibly new software to accommodate the process.
• Excel files are being passed around and modified is another big one. Where there are excel files, or really any files, that are being passed around and modified by many different people there is something to be investigated. Again with the data integrity point, data is very important but it is useless if it is wrong. There might be an online sub version collaborative document solution (tongue twister alert) that is open-source and free or an enterprises solution if your company likes to splurge. Like always, after further investigation, you might find that there is room for new software creation that can accommodate the process.

2. Task Assignments

• If people are being assigned tasks and it is being handled by mouth or email, there might be something wrong here. Some things online are a solved problem, it is something that has been looked at and solved for way before your company found out there was even a problem. There are numerous free and enterprise that can handle management of tasks.
• If tasks are being assigned, passed around, need approval or need tracking; you might need some sort of workflow solution. This is slightly the same scenario as above, only it involves a workflow. There are also free and enterprise solutions that can help handle this, in addition to open-source (free) solutions that can help you create a workflow that suits you needs exactly. One really important reason for using a workflow solution, other than task management and notifications, is dispute resolution this is a big deal. When something goes down, you need to have records of how things went down and tracking to back it up. If you have records showing what went where and who did what, this can help resolve disputes where it’s one persons word against another.

3. Multi-System Madness

• Management of multiple systems is something that is pretty easy to identify. Here is a list of why it is inefficient: Logging in / logging out, transferring data around (maybe using excel files), having to manage login information and url’s. All of that madness wastes time and compromises data while at the same time compromises sanity. There are multiple ways to fix this and a great way might be to create an interface to manage this. Creating a unified interface that can operate via web services might be a great way to provide a solution to other companies with similar problems.

There are, I am sure, many more that could go on this list. However, when coming into a company that is looking to technology to increase productivity and process these are the biggest offenders.