Improve Your Business Process in 5 Simple Steps Though many startup companies may fly by the seat of their pants in the beginning, eventually, every business owner has to come up with dozens of processes to help run a company. These processes can be formal or informal steps taken by employees. Either way, they are an essential part of making sure tasks are accomplished. However, you may be setting up processes that are inefficient or simply not as effective as they could be. To get the most time and value out of your day, take a look at the processes you’ve set up. Could they be improved? Most likely, the answer is yes. And if you’ve answered “yes,” read on to see how you can make your business more streamlined and effective.

1. Document You’re here reading this article, so you’ve probably already recognized that there is room for improvement in your business process. However, you’ll want to go more in-depth analyzing your processes before you can make valuable changes. To begin this analysis, document the entire process you’re thinking about improving. Write a step-by-step outline of how the process is carried out from start to finish. You can do this by making a flow chart, a list or some type of visual graphic.

2. Analyze Now you can think about the steps that are unnecessary, costly, frustrating, or time-consuming. Think deeply about the cause and effect of each step. Question everything and consider if it might be done an alternative way. Think about the reason why things are being done the way they are. Ask for feedback from others involved in the process to get the best analysis.

3. Restructure Now that you’ve analyzed where the problems lie within your process, start redesigning the steps. You don’t have to necessarily start at the beginning of the process, but start with the step you have an idea of how to change first. Work with a group to brainstorm several ideas on how a process could work before committing to one of them.

4. Implement change Now that you’ve decided on a new way to run the process, follow through with the changes by introducing them to everyone involved. Make sure that everyone completely understands the new way of doing things. Answer questions, hand out

explanations and make sure people understand that even the new process is not set in stone.

5. Review After you’ve been running the process in the new way for several weeks or months, the final step is to review how things are going. Work together with your team to analyze the improvements that have been made, new problems that may have come up, or old problems that are still not resolved. Don’t get frustrated if the process still isn’t as efficient as it could be — fine-tuning could take several attempts. The important thing to remember is that you’ve probably made great strides in improving the situation for your employees and your company as a whole. Photo credit: l4red0