Short description: In my latest blog post, I share my experience and insights on how adding layers to processes can sometimes lead to unnecessary complexity and inefficiency. I discuss how this problem can be recognized and fixed, and offer practical advice for streamlining processes in a way that benefits the team and organization as a whole. Whether you’re a manager or team member looking to improve your workflow, my article offers valuable tips and strategies to simplify your processes and maximize your productivity.
Processes are established to improve team efficiency, communication, planning, and other business flows. Often when we have new challenges teams incline towards creating processes to become more lean and agile. However sometimes these additional layers can become a burden, and if not monitored with a bigger picture in mind, added complexity can be misinterpreted for successful implementation.
This can lead team away from the source of the problem and produce all sorts of different ones that would be fixed by just removing unnecessary layers. This article will focus on recognizing when we have too many layers.
In my experience this usually gets noticed late or overlooked because of:
- A lot of time spent on planning of the process and it gets really hard to take a step back and asses situation objectively
- New layers can help certain teams or roles but nobody takes into account effect on wider organisation
- Its really hard to back up findings about processes with data in early stages
- Nobody likes to write one in “loss column“
How do we recognise and fix this?
Although there is no magic solution to this problem, there are couple of ways to jump ahead of the curve and try to cut this problem at the root.
Interviews
Processes need to be clear, simple and understandable. Conduct a series of small interviews with random people on your team with different roles, but be careful… Allow them to describe their understanding of the process and how it operates, without prompting them towards a ‘right’ answer.
If there are discrepancies in their understanding of the process, that is likely our first red flag.
Process layers
Based on the interviews, create a diagram that depicts how the new process layers are implemented and compare it to the original plan. I’m always suspicious if we have more layers than initially planed.
Time
Processes are made to make our life easier and our day to day tasks simpler. One of the easiest way to figure out whether new layers make sense is to monitor our time efficiency before and after. If it does not improve your efficiency, remove it.
While this topic is complex and has a lot of “what-if“ scenarios I would add couple of additional notes:
- If its working, don’t touch it (much). Do small improvements rather than changing the whole flow
- Processes are just like products, start with a minimum viable product.
- Nothing changes overnight, don’t stir the pot too much unless the pot is broken
Let me know what do you think on this subject and if you have some advices for me in the comment section.
Thank you,
Adnan
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