Ignore these and your process will fail

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Every good process needs three things:

• Expectations
• Visibility
• Accountability

Failure to address any one them and your process will fail.

Processes are fragile things. Easy to describe, easy to put on paper, but when real humans get involved, watch out!

When it comes to process, everyone likes to break the rules. But without expectations you don’t know what success looks like, without accountability you communicate a lack of importance, and without visibility you can’t see how things are performing.

Here are three things you can do to set any new process up for success.

Define your goal

What are you putting the process in place to achieve and who will be impacted?

Answer this question, put it on paper and make sure that it is understood by all process participants.

In the absence of alignment on the goal, your process will be misunderstood and ignored.

Create visibility

You need to be able to monitor how the inputs in your process are being transformed to accomplish your goal. You need the proper inspection mechanism in place to identify bottlenecks…