I haven’t perfected this yet and it’s a continuously evolutionary process but I wanted to spend a moment talking about business process management at a basic level – what you can and should do and how it can improve your professional life (and potentially your personal life.)
This article represents just a basic overview of the process. The actual implementation may be covered in other articles or you can get in touch and we can chat about a strategy in your business.
The three steps I (and others, I don’t lay claim to coming up with this idea but it’s one I try to live by) recommend – elimination, automation and outsourcing. I’ll describe each a little further below.
Eliminate what need not be done – There are some tasks – daily, weekly or monthly that you should just not be doing. This might be work tasks you do “because we’ve always done them.” It may be volunteer work you don’t actually like doing. You might be a member of a network group that’s not providing any return. Many people fall into the trap of trying to “improve” processes that just simply should not be done. So, before you move onto the steps below make sure that you decide first whether a task is something that warrants doing at all.
Automate what you can – This is not an exhaustive list of the tasks you can automate but it’s a starting point that works for most businesses – you can post to social networks, you can keep track of what’s happening on social networks, you can automate website logins and filling in forms, you can create email templates and signatures, you can use software to track website leads, web traffic and email read rates, you can (and should, preferably offsite) automate backing up your computer, you can use website to track media mentions and track RSS feeds and you can automate parts of your customer relations. There are also a number of macros and scripts that you may be able to develop for certain aspects of your business to make your life easier.
Outsource anything you can – I want to illustrate this appointment first with an example. Let’s say your time is worth $150 per hour or more. Is it an effective use of your time to be creating databases or doing some data entry when you could be paying a VA overseas $10 per hour to manage something like this? Of course not. You should make a list of tasks to outsource – those that need to be done and can’t be automated but you shouldn’t be doing as they are not the most effective use of your time. Here’s a great list of 101 potential tasks you could outsource.
As mentioned, this article is just a starting point. If you want to look at these areas in your business and discuss how technology can help you in all of these areas, please get in touch today.