How to Spot Inefficiencies at Your Company
Sometimes you're too close to spot inefficient processes, so we put together a bunch of questions that can help you root out these problem areas.
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How to Spot Inefficiencies at Your Company
Today we’ve got a little more tactical post for you to close out the year. This might be something to have in your back pocket to start out 2024 by finally killing all the inefficient processes that are slowing your company down.
In May, I started Obvify, which was created to help companies identify these areas and provide solutions. One of the best ways to get at what’s slowing companies down is obviously just by talking with people on the team. I found that it was helpful to have a list of questions to walk through that would get people talking and help them come up with these inefficiencies.
These structured questions are necessary because if you simply ask someone what processes are inefficient, you won’t come up with much. This is because some of these processes are so deeply embedded and just “second nature” that people just do them and don’t even know there’s a better way. Over time, the list of questions evolved and now there are questions specific to different functions within the company (e.g., sales, engineering, finance, etc.)
Today, I’m going to share the general questions that I think are applicable for every team and then also provide a link to the full document with the hundreds of questions we use. If you do decide to use these questions, don’t require people to actually write out the answers. This is meant to spark some ideas and hopefully come up with a few areas where there are inefficiencies.
And if you do find some areas where you need help, but aren’t sure how to solve them on your own, set up a no-cost discovery call with our team here:
General Questions
These are useful for all teams (and team leads) to root out some of the biggest areas that need fixed. Each question is followed by a rationale that might help spark some other ideas.
What are the most time-consuming manual tasks your team is currently responsible for, and how much time do they take? This question helps identify the tasks that will benefit the most from automation and to help to quantify the time being wasted. Usually team members can list out a number of things here off the top of their head.
Can you describe a process in your workflow that you believe is inefficient or prone to errors? This question is similar to the first one, but with an emphasis on errors. Inefficiency isn’t just time wasted in completing a task. It also comes from where highly manual, but complex tasks lead to people making mistakes, which requires fixing the errors and then doing everything all over again.
How are you currently handling data integration and synchronization across various platforms or systems? This question addresses a VERY common problem in many companies – the difficulty of managing and synchronizing data across different systems. This is a task that automation can often handle more efficiently and accurately.
What repetitive tasks does your team do that take away from higher-value work? This question helps to understand tasks that may seem small but add up over time, and that are taking time away from more strategic, valuable work. We often have teams identify tasks that they seem to think are important, but are actually just urgent, but not really important and those are different things. This helps get at that idea a bit and also helps to justify future spending on fixing these problems. You may come up with a list of other things your team could be doing that deliver a much higher return making any investments in fixing issues pay for itself.
Those are four very general questions to get you started. HERE is a link to a much more comprehensive document I put together that has questions for every key function within most companies. I’d encourage you to share this with your teams and make a copy of your own. It might be a helpful exercise for your team to just add comments to some questions that stand out to them to help get the conversations going.
And (one more time) if you do find some areas where you need help, but aren’t sure how to solve them on your own, set up a no-cost discovery call with our team here:
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