SOPs, or Standard Operating Procedures, are often written by people who understand a process, not necessarily the people who know how to do it best. Finding the few people who know how to do it best, in practise, in real life, and getting them to define the optimum process can do a lot to help improve a process' performance . Apart from the obvious savings to time there could be quality improvements, customer satisfaction improvements and more. Who's writing your business' SOPs? Giles Johnston Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

Over time standards often drop. This can affect all manner of things within your business, from customer service, to quality records, and more. There is an interesting insight to this called 'broken window theory' ( Wilson and Kelling ), where windows were seen to be broken on derelict buildings, and as it was seen as OK (i.e. no one was prosecuted) then everyone else joined in. Eventually all of the windows were smashed out, by people who normally wouldn't get involved. How does this manifest in your business? Do people see others who don't tow the line and complete the necessary actions / disciplines without corrective actions being taken? Do they then follow suit? A good example of this going wrong in a manufacturing business is with data entries into an MRPII system (or the routines around the system). A failure to provide the right information, or inputs, can create all kinds of chaos. I see many businesses where the users put up with the chaos and cre

Many people hate meetings. There are so many meetings that people attend, and most of the ones I have observed fail to agree / allocate tasks and define responsibilities. They also take too long. Many of these meetings however are routine, they are basically the same meetings week in week out (or day in day out). Taking the time to stop and review the purpose of the meeting can allow you to standardise the meeting, making it more clockwork and functional than it may be currently. The meetings may become 'samey' in structure, but if you can speed them up then they don't become stale. And who knows, you may decide to stop running a few meetings in the process. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

When a business is struggling to achieve its business objectives then a review of the standards agreed in the business can make a radical change. Sometimes this change can take place rapidly. One of the simplest agreements we can make is how long a part of the business will take to respond to customers. This gives the people in the business a standard to focus on and (hopefully) the customers a better quality of service. Defining the key parts of the business process and looking at how they affect the achievement of the business objectives can tell you how each part needs to perform. Once this contribution is understood a standard can be set for its performance. This might be lead time, delivery performance, error rate etc.. Having standards is of course a benchmark for beginning your continuous improvement adventure. Once you achieve the standards initially agreed you can ask the question 'how far can we go with improving this business?' Agreeing standards in

So many businesses rely on their computer systems to provide accurate and meaningful information. In many cases their databases are riddled with holes, or even worse, incorrect information. Bad data often leads to the users creating sub systems to cope with the lack of confidence, which can create other problems including wasted time.  If you find that the data in your organisation is unreliable then don't keep quiet. Ensure that the offenders know that their data collection / input methods aren't acceptable and keep supporting them until the situation changes. Find out why the data is so bad. There may be an educational element, they may not fully understand what is required and some quick adjustments can make a big difference to the quality of data. When you do have reliable information available to you make sure that the data is used so that people value good data. If you're not going to use the information to help drive your business forwards then what is t

Many business improvement projects are embarked upon when some of the basics in a business are not being catered for. These projects are unlikley to work. The basics have to be in place first - the frills come second. When we ignore the fundamentals of a business little cracks appear in the business. Over time these cracks get bigger and bigger until something significant happens. For those of you who are into root cause problem solving you will know that this occurs only too often. However, if we fix the basics, we can prevent the occurrence of a 'show stopper'. When projects are designed to improve the finer aspects of how a business works it is always a good opportunity to make sure that all of the basics are in place already. I'm sure that you have heard countless 'house' analogies about weak foundations. Are there things in your business that aren't quite right that need to be tackled head on? By all means do the other tweaks later on. Are there patte

When a task needs to be performed in a business it is straightforward to write a standard operating procedure and then hope that the results obtained are the ones you want. One way to improve this haphazard approach to results is to define the standard expected of the result. If you define the attributes of the result you can give people a far clearer picture to work with, this can help them to achieve your vision of the result more consistently. Explain which areas need to be rigid, and allow the other areas to include flexibility. The parts that are vital and really shape the result needs to be rigid, whilst the other areas can be done in a style that suits the individual. For example, if your business has a sign-off sheet that needs to include a signature, explain that it will not be accepted if there is no signature on the sheet. Be flexible as to what colour pen the signature is in - the important thing is that the sheet is signed. Maintain and measure the standard on a regu

Businesses run on routines. Every day there will be some kind of activity that needs to take place like clockwork. If the routine task does not take place it will probably not be the end of the world, but if the task is never done the quality of the service, or the standards in the business may well drop. If routines of work are important then why do we struggle to keep them in place? One answer for this question is that we don't create formal rotas / schedules of activity that are clearly visible and located in a public place within the business. It does require discipline to maintain routine activities - especially when we become really busy. With a rota we are more able to remember what we need to do in order for the business to run smoothly, professionally and efficiently. If you need more help than just a rota then you may want to try implementing an end of week checklist for your own personal use, or put a reminder on your phone / email calendar. As the habit forms an

With so many day to day tasks required to complete our jobs it is hardly surprising that some items don’t get completed when urgent projects appear on our desks instead. The day to day gives way to the fire fighting and unique most times. The use of a timetable is one way to coping with your daily (or routine) tasks, but often the rigid nature of a timetable means that it can be discarded in a matter of days when the other items get in the way (that spur of the moment meeting, that customer complaint, that colleague who has phoned in sick etc..). How can we create a way forward that is more flexible to cope with both the erratic demands on our time and the stability of routine tasks? You could consider a ‘start of shift’ approach with a list of tasks that need to be completed and an ‘end of shift’ slot so the tasks that didn’t get completed at the start of the day could be completed at the end. You could timetable parts of the week into our diaries, once we had worked out which

From time to time – if we look back at what we are doing – we may see that disciplines have slipped. From the team meeting to the sales order process the need for discipline is necessary, but how do we regain it in a simple way? Talking with our teams to ‘redesign’ the activity is probably one of the easiest ways to bring discipline back into the fold. The pure awareness of what the purpose is can get the discipline back in place. Speaking with influential individuals about the activity and asking what they can do to help is another simple way to get things back on track. This method is more discreet and possibly could take less time to organise. There are many ways to regain discipline, but few reasons to be disciplined.  Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk