No one is perfect and no matter who you are you probably won’t get it right the first time. We all know the famous line of Thomas Edison: “I didn’t fail I just found ten thousand ways it won’t work”. In creating the value that you seek the manner in which you seek process improvement is more important to long term success than the particular actions which you take to get to peak performance. In other words; nothing is wasteful about making changes when performance can be improved.
The following is an outline of how scientific method can be applied to your business:
Focus on what is actually occurring. What works and what do not?
What can be improved and what options do you have?
Given the options that you have discovered so far, which of the ideas that you have (yours and your staff’s) do you think will have the greatest impact on the process?
Choose the course of action that seems best to you.
Execute the change, holding off on making more than one adjustment to the process at a time.
Measure your success with your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), How has percent efficiency changed (Inputs-outputs) / Inputs times one hundred? What was the effect on Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for products or Cost of Services for your service business? Did revenue improve? Did your margin for profit increase?
Decide whether to maintain the changed variable or to go back to the way that you were doing it before.
The better clarity you have in the beginning of this cycle about what it is that you are trying to accomplish the more likely you will succeed. It pays to put process improvement analysis on your schedule to revisit what can be done at present to improve your game at regular intervals. This can be difficult to accomplish when you are stuck in a quarterly mindset and trying to please shareholders. Often it is independent companies who manage change best. Although General Electric, Apple, Microsoft and many others have shown us, with proper leadership, even large multi-billion dollar entities with all of their moving parts adopt new innovations that completely change the landscape
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