Operations Diagnostics

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Removing barriers to success

Given the pace of business now, it can be easy for processes to become outdated and inefficient. This can lead to subpar performance, increased costs, and decreased customer satisfaction. We've seen hundreds of challenges, some resulting in wins, and some not.

With our experience, we can identify process friction and help you:

Boost productivity. Streamline workflows and eliminate bottlenecks.
Empower your team. Foster a more collaborative and efficient work environment.
Delight your customers. Deliver exceptional products and services.
Improve your bottom line. Reduce costs and increase profitability.

By focusing on a limited number of key processes and setting clear goals, we can help you achieve sustainable growth and success. Let's work together to transform your business.

AREAS OF FOCUS

Product development

From gathering crucial input and prioritizing initiatives through to detailed planning, execution, testing, and launch, a healthy product and technical organization has a clearly defined set of operating guidelines that everyone understands. We can help you define yours.

Technical health and risk mitigation

As with processes that grow naturally over the course of time, software code can become inefficient and even insecure in ways that can put user data in jeopardy and engineering or deployment teams at a disadvantage when it comes to even completing the minimum of their responsibilities, leading to frustration, burnout, and attrition. We can work with you and your tech leadership to identify and prioritize these issues, and recommend how they can be incorporated into your roadmap without disrupting your progress and innovation.

Executive communication

An executive leadership team working in concert with each other has a halo effect through the entire company. Making progress requires decisions made at the right time and communicated in the right way. We can help you set up a meeting architecture that zeroes in on what needs discussion, how to quickly get to the matter at hand, and then how to communicate relevant info throughout your organization to maintain momentum.

Employee onboarding

Recruitment is expensive. A new employee's first weeks are critical in determining their success, and are instrumental in giving you a good return on investment in landing them in the first place. Excellent onboarding gives your newest people the skills they need to survive the first few months, the tools they need to continue their learning, and the confidence that will see them become happy and productive contributors. With an extensive background in training and l&d, we can review your onboarding process and give our honest appraisal of where it is strong and where it needs work.

Performance management

We firmly believe that clarity is the number one factor in a company's success: clarity of mission, clarity of strategy, and clarity of goals. To get the best performance out of individuals, it's clarity of expectations that is most necessary, and a way to measure the meeting, exceeding, or falling short of those expectations. And when those expectations are not being met, you should have a plan to empower that employee with resources and assistance until they are successful or you have determined it's not a good fit.

Mission, vision, and strategy

A company's mission makes a roadmap possible. It kickstarts your marketing strategy, it gives employees something to rally behind, it attracts new talent, it distinguishes you from your competition, and it is the light that illuminates your vision. Your vision provides the north star that guides your direction and informs the strategy you take to meet your objectives. The relationship between mission, vision, objectives, and strategy is the backbone for your entire organization, and the stronger it is, the stronger you are.

Customer journey

The concept of user-centric thinking can permeate through your entire company, and the customer's journey as they move from the first marketing touchpoint all the way through to closed won and then onboarding and finally with any support issues is a user experience like any other. The importance of keeping that experience guided, informative, consistent, and, most of all, painless cannot be overstated. We can work with your teams to get a start to finish perspective on what your customers are experiencing as they move from one stage of your process to the next.

Quarterly planning

Department planning and review meetings should be meaningful, they should be a necessary step in decision making after significant preparation, and they should connect to each other with a series of inputs and outputs that turn your organization into a finely tuned machine. Knowing when each department reviews the previous quarter, plans for the upcoming one, and the information each one pulls in and pushes out creates a quarterly planning and review cycle that brings clarity and cohesiveness.

Cross-department collaboration

Each department in your company connects and overlaps with others to function effectively. Sometimes that relationship is explicit and obvious, and sometimes the opportunities for collaboration require more thought and planning. These "task forces" should have clear objectives, key contributors, and solid deliverables that result in stronger roadmaps, marketing with a strong customer voice, urgent bug resolution, or a level-headed action plan in times of emergency, to name a few. We can give you insights as to how you can improve these cross-functional collaborations.

STAGE 1

Set goals

SET GOALS

Once you've decided which workflows to improve, we will work with you to set concrete KPIs that are achievable and that will assure you that your requirements are met.

STAGE 2

Study, participate, and interview

We delve deep into key processes, study your documentation, attend meetings or ceremonies, and interview key employees to understand your current workflows and pinpoint inefficiencies that hinder your growth.

STAGE 3

Expert analysis

We analyze our findings to gain a comprehensive understanding of operational challenges.

STAGE 4

Recommendations & gap planning

You receive a clear roadmap for improvement, with prioritized suggestions to streamline your processes. Then, we meet to build a plan on addressing the issues in prioritized order.

BENEFITS

IMPROVED OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

It may seem obvious, but working through a prioritized list of process improvements will make you wonder how you lived with issues as long as you did.

INCREASED PRODUCTIVTY & AGILITY

Learning how and when to improve what most needs it will make you much less tolerant of weak spots in your workflows going forward.

ENHANCED TEAM COLLABORATION

Removing roadblocks frees your teams up to invest in richer, smarter collaboration as a result of knowing and leveraging each other's strengths.

FASTER TIME-TO-MARKET

Consistent efficiency improvements get your organization addicted to progress, and that includes your ability to build, launch, and sell.

ROADMAP VELOCITY

Forecasting engineering timelines is one of the hardest things you'll ever do, but it's much easier when the path is clear and surprises are rare.

IMPROVED MORALE

Nothing is more frustrating than a fixable problem that doesn't get fixed, and nothing feels better when your teams feel you prioritizing their pain relief.

Takeaways

At the conclusion of this project, you will have:

Agreement on your leadership team on which processes or workflows require improvement, and in which order
A clear and documented understanding of how these processes are currently being done and where the inefficiencies are
A detailed set of recommendations for improvements in prioritized order
A clear understanding of which of your employees are the go-to subject expert for the processes you've chosen to improve
A plan on how to address the gaps identified in our recommendations

Ready to hear more?

If you're interested in hearing more about how you can benefit from our roadmap workshops and/or operational diagnostics, send us a quick message and we'll get right back to you to set up some time together!

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