Trying to replicate a paper-based process that’s been in use for years, if not decades, as a digital solution is a recipe for failure. Part of what helped me gain a foothold in my career was an ability to take those (overly) complex business processes, break them down into their most discrete parts, then develop a digital/automated solution for it.
The biggest pushback to those solutions I’ve received are less quantitative, and more qualitative (which should not discount their validity), such as:
- These processes have been in place for a long time for a reason, why change them?
- If you automate everything, the people that did those things will be out of a job.
- You can’t digitize everything, so stop trying!
There’s nothing wrong with being wrong.
There’s nothing more harmful to a business than to dig its heels in and hide behind “it’s worked so far, why change it?” It’s not always about the change. It’s about reviewing that process and being open (and willing) to admit inefficiency. Admit being wrong. Remember, right and wrong change over time. You need to be open to saying, “This process served us for the past X years, times have changed, maybe we need to consider something new.” That in itself is as powerful as actually developing the new process/solution itself.
- “You’ll cost people their jobs!”
You need to remember that your employees are your asset — they depend on you, and you depend on them. Your stakeholders depend on both you and them working as efficiently, and harmoniously, as possible. It’s incumbent upon you, both as an employer and as a person, to help them. Your willful failure to do so borders on irreverence; they give you hours, days, years, literal decades of their lives. They spend more time with you than they do with their family. You can give them new skill sets to succeed without harming their livelihood. The more you give them, the more they’ll be able to give you back, even unknowingly.
“You mean it’s that easy?”
Here’s an example: I’d created a form that was automated through a workflow in SharePoint Designer 2013 (RIP InfoPath); the originator submits it, it goes to an approver based on aspects of the account code, it was able to be edited/updated if it were rejected…Then once approved it would add the data to a list, email an employee that the form had reached final approval, and then that employee was able to proceed with the rest of the process. Throughout implementation we learned:
- There were departments in the former “approval” process that literally wouldn’t even review the requests. They would take the piece of paper (sent via inter-departmental mail), stamp it, put it back in an envelope, and shove it to the next person in line. Rinse and repeat.
- There were departments that “saved” those sorts of approvals until later in the day, or even later in the week, just because it was so cumbersome to sort through all of them. What was new? What was a correction? What was actually cancelled days ago, but word hadn’t gotten to them yet?
- Sometimes departments that had to approve the requests didn’t even know the request existed because someone sent it to the wrong person, or simply forgot.
Besides being met with the typical aversion to change, and after getting over that mountain, I found the most common compliment (which I still regard as the highest compliment anyone can give to me), was “I can’t believe it’s that easy.” In a similar vein, “Where was this X years ago?”
Play your part.
You need to acknowledge that there’s a chance that while exploring an existing process you’ll discover that you don’t need steps 2, 7, and 9. Great! Cut out those steps.
- “But what will that position do?”
I promise you, they have plenty of other things to do in their day, and most likely, they’ll thank you for leaving them out. You’re a driving force in making people’s lives better. Examine that process, find what works and what doesn’t. Then ask everyone, get every stakeholder in the meeting, what can we do to make it better?
I promise you, every single person will have an answer for you. And do you know where to start? Pick one of their answers, evaluate it, then fix it. Determine concrete actions to fix it.
Then fix the next one.
You’ll find that the solutions aren’t hard, or difficult, and 99% of the time they don’t require radical revisions to the existing process. 100% of the time you will be better than you were yesterday. Eventually, you might find, that you can develop an automated solution. Eventually, you will find, that the time you save people is worth more to them than the time they spent suffering through that process in the first place.
