The key to keeping a process simple is to build it with longevity in mind. Simplicity is often a difficult goal to achieve. As human beings, our goal is generally to keep things as simple as possible despite the tendency to make things more complicated than necessary. When information is presented to us, it is our nature to synthesize what is before us, understand the details, and consider all options before doing even the smallest thing. Try as we might, our propensity for detail and thoroughness naturally lead us towards complicated processes. The effort required to protect simplicity is substantial, and simple processes – those that can be easily remembered, understood, implemented, and measured – will over time become complicated.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of working directly with a highly qualified and technical team of software engineers. Our goal was to create a very simple process that we could use to govern all the work that we did together. It took months of meetings, proofs of concept, and individual discussions to get the team to embrace the idea of simplicity. It took us a few more months to agree on a simple, high-level process. After a lot of work, we agreed that the simplest process for us was a three-step procedure where work could be received, processed and delivered. We described what was necessary to receive work in the first step, what was required to process the work, and what was needed to deliver the work upon completion.
The end result was a process that could be easily taught and learned. The system we developed was repeatable, measurable, and easy to understand. It was also surprisingly flexible. All that was left for the team was to determine how to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of this new process. It would take another three weeks to identify the metrics.
At the end of the three weeks, I met with the team and they informed me that they had not only identified the key metrics, but that they had fine-tuned the process to make it better and more comprehensive. They wanted to leave no stone unturned, so they added a series of substeps to each of the three main steps. While the sub-steps provided users of the process with more detailed instructions that were very specific to our particular type of work, the additional steps also complicated the process and made it quite tedious. Remember, the initial goal was to create a simple process.
In my experience, engineers want to know as much detail as possible about their work. Very often, the downside of such thinking is that it prevents the creation of simple processes that can be easily executed and maintained. In our case, even the smallest change in our process flow would require updating the subsequent steps. The team ended up generating more than fifty key metrics to measure the effectiveness of the previously simple process. With so many points to consider, the process became very difficult to maintain and, more importantly, it was very difficult to understand. Over the course of three weeks, our simple process had broken down into a complex series of steps that no one was going to use. Therefore, he returned to the drawing board.
It took another two weeks to convince the team to review the above process. Interestingly, the original process has been in place for nearly 15 years and has weathered organizational changes, management changes, mergers, acquisitions, and changes in the team that put the system in place. The process itself is still quite simple and has only undergone minor changes, proving its flexibility.
A good process, whether simple or complex, can resist change. By creating a simple process, team leaders, project managers, and organizational leaders must guard against the temptation to “tweak” procedures with small improvements that, over time, can add unnecessary steps to a process that is already built to serve. appropriately to your goal. objective. Leaders can prevent processes from getting too complicated by asking the following questions:
- Is the recommended change absolutely necessary?
- Will all users of the existing process use the change?
- Will the change help make the process even easier to use, maintain and support?
If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, the process change should not be implemented. It’s easy to complicate a process and hard to protect simplicity. However, a simple and intelligent workflow that is repeatable, measurable and flexible throughout the life of the process is worth the effort.