The busier we are the more likely it is that we will experience a failure in the process and therefore the busier we are, the greater the risk.

We are just too busy right now.

Here is the conversation I have heard a million times, probably you too?, “Why are we still doing this manually? We need to remove the paper and spreadsheet and automate these processes.” Followed by “Sure, but why? It is working, what are we going to achieve?” and “besides we are too busy to make any changes right now anyway”. – Conversation over!

I get it. We are always busy. It is never a really good time. But let us consider for a moment, the more fundamental issue that we really should be asking ourselves. What happens if someone fails to complete a certain step?, What if different people do different steps, how can we ensure the same outcome?, Really the question is; What is the cost of process failure?,

a) Can someone get injured?, could they die?

b) Could we face legal issues, court costs and settlements?

c) How would this tarnish our brand and reputation?

d) How much money are we wasting or failing to recover?

e) Could this effect shareholders, management, careers, jobs?

By nature we often do not realize the implications of process failure. We call these failures accidents and mistakes. Nice words to deflect blame!. One could argue that there are really very few mistakes and almost certainly no such thing as an accident!, Virtually every single accident can be traced back to a failure at some point in a process (set of rules) that was not followed and consequently things went awry from there. I’m not only referring to an accidental freeway smash, (brakes, following distance, speed, another driver etc), accidents occur in the mundane too. As in I forgot to do this, I overlooked that?, I didn’t know, as in “I’m sorry it was a mistake, next time…”

This is why we need to evaluate the consequences, and understand that these manual processes, these external spreadsheets, these processes that rely on someone knowing what to do and doing it uniformly could put or companies and the people that work there at great risk.

The question really becomes one of can we afford not to make the changes?, How do we tighten up the processes?, How do we enforce uniformity to ensure consistent outcomes?, and yes the busier we are the more likely it is that we will experience a failure in the process and therefore the busier we are, the greater the risk.

The conversation really ought to be, “How do we improve this right away, before we have a problem?”.

WorkOptima is the tool to help organize processes and enforce compliance to ensure better outcomes.