What Needs to be Done in Your Business This Year?

January is often the time for planning the year’s strategies and direction.  What needs to be done in your business this year?  Answering that question may seem daunting at first, but there is a structured approach which can be taken.  In this article, review AJC’s methodology for boiling a potentially overwhelming question into actionable answers. 
Added Incentive: If you sign up for our newsletter by February 10, we will send you a free copy of AJC’s Prioritization Matrix Template referenced in Step 3 below!

First: Pre-Work
Using as much data as possible, review the previous year(s) financial trends: gross revenue, net revenue, fixed and variable overhead spend, and if possible – root cause where business came from.  Delegate this work to appropriate team members, if necessary.  Ideally, it will be prepared for presentation in chart format, exported to a slide deck for ease of viewing (Google Sheets/Slides or Excel/PowerPoint both work fine).  It might be beneficial to have the analyst prepare a no-frills report describing the various charts and what the data indicates in a document (Google Docs, Word, etc.) which is distributed to the Leadership team.

Second: Review / Brainstorm
Gather the Leadership Team to review the data.  Team members should have reviewed the presentation and/or report ahead of time and list their questions about the data and/or ideas for how to address improvements in the new year on their own.  The meeting Facilitator will lead the group through the review and capture all questions for follow up and/or ideas which are generated during the review.  After the data review, the Facilitator will lead the group through a brainstorming session where all ideas or opportunities for improvement and/or specific problem areas are discussed and documented.  Again, a simple no-frills list is the best way to capture ideas at this time.

Note:  It is often helpful to perform this exercise as a group with a Facilitator who has “no skin in the game,” so to speak.  That is, in order to maintain total objectivity, the Facilitator should not be biased toward any particular problem or pre-conceived notion of what the data indicates or opportunities should be.

At the end of the meeting, you should have two lists and two documents which should be shared with the team:

1. List of further data analysis required based on questions from group
2. List of brainstormed ideas/opportunities for improvement/problems to solve
3. Document with aligned facts that the financial data review means to the company
4. Document any action items captured during the meeting (action, owner, due date, etc.)

Third: Sleep On It / Follow Up and Prepare Prioritization Matrix
While the rest of the Leadership Team sleeps on the Review / Brainstorm meeting, one or two Analysts follow up with the data analysis required from step #1 above, and another and/or the Facilitator will organize the brainstormed ideas/opportunities into a Prioritization Matrix.  At AJC, we use a FMEA-style matrix with three categories.  These can be modified based on your company’s particular need, but typically look something like this (AJC’s template):

AJC Prioritization Matrix Preview

At this point, only the “Idea/Opportunity/Problem Area” column need be filled out; though the preparer may take an initial stab at the Categories and/or numerical assignments.  Note that the example has “5” values inserted to illustrate how the visual prioritization coloring formulas work in this template.  Also, note that the last column for “Risk Priority” is binomial.  This column is useful in regulated industries such as Biotech, Aerospace, Food Industry, Financial, or other regulated industries where there are particular areas which must be in place/effective irrespective of anything else. 

Fourth: Follow Up Meeting / Prioritization Matrix Completion
After the offline analysis and Prioritization Matrix preparation, the Leadership team reconvenes to review the additional data and any action items captured in the first meeting which are relevant to that group (note: these may have been parsed to separate groups/meetings), and to complete the Prioritization Matrix.  The Facilitator will take the group through each item on the list and help ensure each item is described and categorized appropriately, and that the scaled categories are assigned values which the team agrees upon. 

After that, the template itself should do the work!  Reorder the template based on Priority Number and/or Risk Priority, and voila!  Now you have an objectively prioritized list of items on which your company should improve upon in the new year. 

Fifth: Implement, Implement, Implement
Of course, having a lovely prioritized list of items is just the beginning of realizing improvements and increased profitability.  The next steps are to develop strategies and implementation plans to execute the new ideas or resolve the problems identified.  However, it is always advisable to work on the most valuable issues first; the ones that can bring in more revenue or reduce costs the most such that the business remains as viable and attractive as possible to owners, shareholders, employees, and the world at large.

Read this article and more on AJC’s blog, and sign up for our newsletter online at: http://andreajonesconsulting.com/blog.aspx

Added Incentive: If you sign up for our newsletter by February 10, we will send you a free copy of AJC’s Prioritization Matrix Template!

Ring In 2017 with a New “Word of the Year”

What is your company’s 2017 Word of the Year?

AJC announces “Growth” as the 2017 word of the year; following 2016 “Strategy” and 2015 “Peace.”  Learn more about how AJC chose these words, and what they mean for us and you going forward in 2017!  We encourage you to select your own word, and would love to hear what it is as a comment to this post at the end of this blog post! 

Two years ago, a colleague suggested that each member of our professional advisory group announce a “word of the year” to help focus and embody their primary goal for the new year.  That was 2015, and AJC’s word was “Peace.”  At the time, AJC was at an inflection point from being an independent consultancy to offering scaled services which would staff additional Associate consultants.  The decision had many facets, and as the owner of AJC, my main goal for that year was to feel at peace about this new business model.

After a year of both successes and learnings, I honestly did feel at peace with the decision to move AJC toward a multi-person group, and in feeling so, decided that the word for 2016 would be “Strategy.”  Transitioning from an independent service provider to a staffed model required a different approach to business development, and I had to develop methods to promote our services to a wider audience.  Hence the inception of this newsletter, as well as beginning to publish content articles in LinkedIn and a new website blog.

In 2017, the natural progression for AJC after “Peace” and “Strategy,” is “Growth:” the New Word of the Year.  It is somewhat intimidating to publicly announce “Growth” as AJC’s word.   There is risk involved as AJC has limited control over the amount of work coming to in, and we plan to pace our growth in order to maintain AJC’s high standards of service over a larger client base with more consultants working.

Still, there are many reasons to be optimistic.  AJC has several high-quality projects under our belt, collectively over the past two years (ten for me).  We have developed terrific client relationships and are pleased to unveil the “Clients” tab of our updated website which provides testimonials from many of our recent engagements.  We have at least three more experienced consultants lined up to join our team in 2017.  But above all, everyone at AJC wants what is truly right for our clients; independent of what this means for us. 

To this end, we have recommended or encouraged clients to work with other consultants on areas that are not in our wheelhouse.  We try to “right-size” projects to fit client budgets and needs.  We coach clients to enable them to take ownership of project work and tools that we have helped to create, and we love to help clients with growth ideas or to make personal connections in any way that we can. 

We believe that “Growth” will come as a natural consequence to our work ethic and beliefs, as well as our strategic marketing efforts and availability of experienced consultants.  When you engage with AJC, we partner with you for the long term; “Growth” happens best with deep and sturdy roots.

Lessons from the Basketball Court: Three Expectations for Improvement

(Image courtesy of free clipart images)

I am head coach for my 3^rd grade daughter’s basketball team this season.  For most of the team members, this is their first year playing the game, and there is room for improvement for each person (coaches included!).

On the first day of practice, we discussed the three expectations that us coaches have of the girls as players. Ruminating on these expectations, it occurs to me that they have parallel significance in the workplace when trying to make improvements.  These are:

1. Respect
2. Always Try
3. Play as One Team

I asked the girls what each of these meant to them.  In their case, “Respect” meant to listen to the coaches, treat each other with kindness and be encouraging to themselves and each other.  This seems to be pretty similar to the baseline expectation in a workplace.  Treat each other with professional courtesy and respect; which extends beyond being “nice” into things like being punctual, considerate of new ideas, trusting others to do their job, holding people accountable for their work, and following the golden rule (i.e. do unto others).  One client recently asked me what the client needed to do in order for an engagement with AJC to be successful.   The first thing necessary is to want to change and improve.   Consultants help catalyze change, and when a client actually wants to change and improve, they are demonstrating respect for the work the consultant is being hired to do.

The next expectation is to “Always Try.”  For the girls, this means active participation:  to try to do every new skill or play being taught them.  They may not be perfect, or even very good, especially the first few times, but only by trying will they master the skills of the game.  The parallel here is quite apparent, and brings to mind that Shakira song from Zootopia:  Try Everything!  As was discussed in a recent article about The Beauty of the Pilot, we have to try things in order to find out how/whether they work, and as a very necessary step towards success.  In the case of consulting, for both the consultant and the client – active participation and trying to make things work, providing feedback on areas to modify and improve, and trying again.  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good – always try!

Finally, “Play as One Team.”  We will win and lose as a team or as a company.  It is of no use to the whole group to have a ball hog; this is not sustainable in basketball or in business.  Like the adage that “a team is only as strong as its weakest player,” everyone needs to work hard to improve.  Naturally there will be differing skills, complimentary and growing; but having a single person assume everything, or worse – optimizing in a silo when the functions or processes up or downstream lag, will not help the company’s bottom line.  AJC worked with one client this past year who was unsure of which of their six main process steps were holding them up in their overall timeline to complete a process.  They were experiencing a lot of personnel “pain” in one area, but when we collected duration data for which step took the longest, it was a totally different area than people expected.  We were able to address both areas; the first to find a better way to minimize the manual work that was causing people “pain,” and the second by changing their capacity and allowing the backlog at the bottleneck to flow more quickly, thus enabling the overall process duration to improve. 

In this way, playing as one team is akin to looking at the overall end-to-end value stream; considering the big picture to delivering a product or service, and using data to ascertain where the weakest area is.  Once we know that, we can improve there, and then move on to the next weakest area.  Always, however, we are working to improve the company or team as a whole.

After explaining the Three Expectations, one girl asked me why I didn’t say “Have Fun!” as an expectation.  Of course, I sincerely hope each girl enjoys basketball and has fun on our team!  However, this is something I cannot require or expect.  It seems to me that this is also true in business.  Sure, it would be great to have fun!  But we can’t make that an expectation as “having fun” is an individual perception.  If we follow our expectations above, it is definitely possible that all of our team members, on the ball court or in a business, will not only change and improve, but have fun too.

Happy Holidays from AJC

How to be both Confident and Humble: Follow Through

Yes, this is yours truly (more than 15 years ago  - boy have digital cameras improved since then ...)

Much has been written on confidence, and especially in regards to confidence in women.  Of course, overconfidence can be a very bad thing; especially when perceived of as arrogance by colleagues or peers.   In fact, much has also been written about humility, and especially with regards to leadership.  Turns out humility is a primary factor in strong leaders, which is actually not all that surprising, considering.  Everyone makes mistakes and it is much more inspiring to follow someone who acknowledges that, learns from his or her mistakes, and moves on.

However, in the workplace there is definitely a fine balance between demonstrating enough confidence to assure others that you will get your work done on time and well; and enough humility to recognize when you need help to accomplish these things.  Furthermore, if you want to be a leader, others need to trust you and your abilities.  This is where follow through comes in.

I googled “confidence humility follow through” and got about 1.3 million hits.  In the first page, however, nothing came up on the strategy of follow through.  Google suggested a similar search on “how to be humble and confident at the same time” which yielded approximately 1.6 million hits, but still did not have anything on the first page about using the strategy of follow through.  Not to be overconfident here, but I’d like to offer a potentially little-discussed strategy that may help one toward the ever so delicate balance of being humbly confident: the strategy of follow through.

Follow through, as the phrase suggests, is the act of admitting you don’t know something or are not done with something, but offering to either find out or complete the work and get back to the requestee/group with the results or confirmed action closure.  It is so simple that it is often overlooked; “Have you done XYZ?” “No, but I’ll do it this afternoon and confirm to the group that it is done.”  “What do you know about ABC?” “Not much, but let me look into it and I’ll get back to you.”  These types of conversations happen daily in a workplace.  The key to instilling trust as a leader, of course, is in actually closing out the follow through cycle.

To illustrate:  when I was just starting out in my career as a Process Engineer at a very large semiconductor company, one of my Ph.D. colleagues asked me how it was that I always knew the right answers for the floor technicians who asked me for direction.  I distinctly remember saying, “I don’t always know the right answer, but I have confidence in my ability to find out.”  I went on to describe that when I didn’t know something, I would look the technician in the eye, admit that I did not know right then, but that I would get back to him or her with the answer or course of action soon.  Then I went about learning whatever I didn’t know and – you guessed it – got back to that person.  Over time, technicians, engineers, and even managers would come to me more and more with questions or requests, and I gained a reputation for getting things done.  Rarely, however, did I actually have all the answers immediately. 

Indeed, even now as a consultant offering process improvement services – I don’t know exactly what to recommend for any given client without research, learning, analysis, discussions, and a lot of collaborative effort.  What works for one company won’t always work for another; it is part of the fun to learn and explore new situations, devise strategies and use tools, both old and new, which will work for each unique circumstance.

To summarize, this is my humble advice: be honest and humble when you do not know, have confidence in your ability to find out; and always follow through with those around you.  Over time, this will help you become a true leader.

Stocking Stuffer Trials, or On the Beauty of the Pilot

 

All Our Stockings In A Row

Christmas is around the corner, and like many people, each member of my family will get a stocking full of goodies from Santa.  As the one who procures the items for Santa to generously impart to each person in his or her stocking, the trick is to ascertain exactly how much “stuff” will fit into each stocking so that it is full, but not overflowing to the point where the integrity of the mantle hook is in jeopardy!

After buying a few things and hemming and hawing about whether it was enough or not, I had an epiphany (no pun intended):  Why not just fill the stockings with what I have and see how much space is left over?  Then I can decide how much more, if anything, I will need to procure for each person, and/or if I need to return anything.  Queue the audio: Duh-duh-DUUUUUUMMMMM!!!   It seems obvious:  Instead of imagining how things will fit, why don’t I just TRY IT? 

Parallel this concept to our professional lives.  Trial and error is one of the BEST ways to determine what works and what does not!  But we don’t want to try things on a large scale initially, because of the risk that they will not work.  If our new ideas fail, we want them to fail on a small scale, and most importantly – in a way that does not affect the customer.  Therein lies the beauty of The Pilot.

The Pilot is a trial period for a new idea, process, or methodology.  It is to be undertaken on a small scale and under increased scrutiny.  It is to be done for a pre-determined amount of time or quantity of trials, with the expectation that changes will be made based on the results.  Speaking of results, the desired results need to be hypothesized (what will success look like?), and actual results measured or compared to the desired result; driving modifications before full implementation.

Piloting a new idea, process, or methodology is not to be confused with continuous improvement, which encourages us to always find ways to make things better in small incremental steps.  Pilots, on the other hand, are typically used for new concepts and/or complete “re-engineering” (kaikaku) of an existing process.

One recent AJC client is a services company that collects information from their customers to begin their internal workflow.  Each information collector had his or her own methodology for what to collect, and how to collect it.  They generally asked for the same information eventually, but often requests were afterthoughts, and “custom” each time, even though 80+% of what they needed was standard for all of their clientele.

We designed a process whereby template letters introducing the required information were sent to clients at specific points in the collection process, inclusive of standardized checklists that could be expanded or contracted based on the specific situation.  The standard content of the templates and checklists were modeled on a few internal best practices, which helped provide credibility to others in the company. Though this methodology may sound simplistic, it was different than anything most people in the company had done before.

Instead of rolling out the templates and checklists to all the employees at the same time, however, the project team decided to instigate a Pilot.  We worked with 25% of the personnel and trained them on the new templates and lists, and asked them to Pilot them for a period of 6 weeks.  Over the course of that time, the project team checked in with the pilot personnel regularly.  We had a cloud-based “issues” list where people could input their real-time feedback or issues with the new materials, and improvements were evaluated and made immediately when possible.  We tracked completeness of checklists for required information at the point of submission to the next internal step, and rework if the recipient found errors and had to return the form throughout the Pilot, and setup internal visual cues to prompt completeness within the checklists themselves.

At the end, the data was reviewed and baseline metric established, and I met with each pilot team member personally to solicit feedback on the new templates and lists.  The overwhelming consensus was that the templates were helpful, but the lists were too cumbersome.  I received lots of practical and specific recommendations and requests for simplification, which were made and re-tested on a shorter timeline.  After the Pilot team felt comfortable with the new materials, we updated the training and rolled out the new process and materials to the entire company.

Piloting is definitely a sound, tried and true practice which allows companies to test new ideas, processes, or methodologies in a safe environment.  Often it is difficult to predict performance without actual experience, and in general, people feel more comfortable knowing that they can always “fall back” on the old way of doing things if the new way doesn’t work.  And by soliciting and incorporating feedback from the pilot group, the change agents instill trust and a sense of ownership resulting in “champions” of the new idea/process/methodology with the rest of the company.

Hopefully this testing idea will work as well for my stocking stuffing activities this December.

Rip Off the Red Tape Band-Aid!

“Red Tape,” according to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, is “an idiom that refers to excessive regulation or rigid conformity to formal rules that is considered redundant or bureaucratic and hinders or prevents action or decision-making.”  What amazes me is that many companies forget who put on the red tape in the first place.  “We can’t do that, it doesn’t follow our protocols!,” “We have to do it this way per our procedures,” or “This is what our process requires us to do.” 

When asked if these protocols/procedures/processes are required by some external regulatory body, most of the time the answer is no.  The company themselves wrote the protocol, procedure, or process; there is no external governing body which holds them to maintaining a legacy practice ad infinitum (or who even cares in the first place!).  Yes, sometimes companies are ISO, SQF, or certified by some other body – but guess what?  Even those certification bodies mainly care that the company does what it claims to do.  They just hold you to your own standards.  Effectively, the company itself decides how much red tape to put on any given process or procedure.

So why don’t companies just CHANGE their outdated/ineffective/excessively complicated/disorganized/ambiguous (etc.) “red tape” methods of doing things?  One reason is that they are stuck in a “fixed mindset,” where they cannot even conceive of making changes.  Change is never easy; we human beings tend to fear the unknown.  Many of us have heard the proverb that it is better to choose the familiar but unpleasant situation rather than the unfamiliar one because that may turn out worse.  But guess what… it also may turn out better, and there’s only one way to find out.

One very exciting company that AJC works with has really embraced the “growth mindset” as described in the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.  This company is ready to embrace change; they recognize that putting processes in place and writing out protocols and procedures does not bind them forever; it just binds them until they recognize a better way of doing things, then they make (and effect) improvements!  A few months ago, we conducted an internal audit of their laboratory.  The laboratory does not use large amounts of hazardous chemicals, but they do use small amounts occasionally, and they have an eyewash station in the lab.  Their safety shower, however, is in a different room and there is a door between the lab and the shower which is typically shut while lab personnel is working.  I pointed this out as a potential safety issue to the manager. 

Within minutes the manager had created a sign and hung it on the door stating that the door was never to be closed when a worker was in the lab alone.  Additionally, she verbally informed all the lab staff of this new rule right away.  By the next week when I arrived, the sign had been printed and laminated on both sides of the door, and all the surrounding personnel in every department had also been trained on the rule.

Needless to say, I was super impressed!  Not only did this company push back on their “protocol” of how they typically operate in the lab with the door closed, but they had made the change within minutes and formalized it within a week.  Everyone recognized that a change was needed, and embraced it without reservation.  This is just one example of the many improvements being made at this company where almost everyone has a growth mindset.

Since the only constant is change itself, we may as well train our mindsets toward growth and Rip Off the Red Tape Band-Aid!  What will it take your company to do this?