"If This, Then That" In The Bigger Picture

One of the topics people assume I am talking about when I talk about Process Management and improving overall operational efficiency is 'marketing automation.' They are not wrong but that is a very, very small segment of the overall picture I want to discuss. I think some of this confusion comes from the success of IFTTT and Zapier, two awesome technologies that can indeed tie together all sorts of marketing and publishing functionalities into automated processes. But these tools and others like them are just an expression of the larger idea of process flow.  

No matter what comes at a business, from a new vendor knocking on the front door to a building fire, there should be a near autonomic set of processes that get triggered and followed. While not every possible situation can, nor should, be mapped out to the nth degree, having a general flow determined is how organizations can scale effectively. If we treat every situation as a brand new thing to sort through and figure out, we are not going to get very far in evolving our brands or meeting the oncoming stream of challenges all business face.

"How Does Your Mail Room Work?"

Let's take a trivial example, snail mail. If you are a small team of less than 5 working in the same physical location, you likely don't need any rules engine in place. The mail comes everyday around 2:00pm and any outgoing mail gets left in a bin for the letter carrier to take with them. When supplies run low, whoever notices it just orders more and this system just kinda works. The system is small enough that everyone just sifts through the mail and deals with it as needed, leaving it out in a pile to sort itself out. This works pretty well since every department is a team of one or two, all the mail gets dealt with effectively by the end of the week.  

Now, let's imagine instead of 5 people, we suddenly have 50 in the same office. Do we trust everyone to have the same level of access to all the mail at once and just sort it themselves? Who in each department is responsible now for collecting their appropriate mail? How many stamps and other mailing supplies do we need to order for the week or month? Who deals with the mountain of mail that accumulates each week that needs to be gone through to make sure it gets routed properly based on contents and not just addressee? What happens when the organization gets to 100 people? 

It becomes pretty clear that this once simple, near automatic process stopped scaling at some point and now there is a situation that requires some kind of management. It would be awesome if this example was the only one I could point to, but it is the tip of a very, very large iceberg that every growing business is sitting on. If you were to take a giant step back from your role at your organization and just think through the things you do because they drive customer value vs things you do as day to day responsibilities, most people will pretty quickly see see their job as a hodgepodge of internal systems and client facing deliverables. Only one of those the client is willing to pay for, and hint, it is not the one about how effective you are at sorting your organization's mail. 

"What Are We Looking For?"

Removing any step that would make you say "let's stop and think about this" is the goal of a good process management program. Spending the time to understand how your business works and how it deals with incoming scenarios can mean the difference from distracting your entire company when an emergency pops up and a calm response that causes no ripples in how most people are delivering.  

While an advanced scenario, if you can honestly answer the question "how would my organization deal with a lawsuit notification around customer data and GDPR related to a third party vendor or partner data breech?" then you have already likely mapped out enough of your business to successfully scale. If you have never stopped to think about that question, or even the mail scenario from earlier, then maybe it is time to think about how you are thinking about any processes.  

"Don't Take On The Whole World At Once"

A very quick way to burn yourself out is to try and 'boil the ocean' on this stuff. You are likely working within an organization that is successful enough to stay in business and have some kind of stable client base, you are already doing a lot of things right. Starting with mapping out how you are doing what you are doing well is an awesome ay to get started that will highlight strengths and make everyone look great. It can also highlight areas where you can make improvements without much investment or a need for massive process changes. Expanding out from there to other processes that effect or could effect your business is a lot simpler once you have built the muscle memory of process mapping and charting workflows.  

Perhaps starting with some marketing automation would be a good way to start for a lot of teams, especially those focused on customer acquisition and conversion. A good place to start but do not stop there, which I think a lot of people do when they get to a 'comfortable' spot with it. Set some metrics around how you want to improve and hit those, then set more and nail those and repeat until you the size of Google and then keep doing it. Even a 1% increase in efficiency is well worth it if it means that 1% of gained time can be used to deliver more customer value, which is the thing that people pay for at the end of the day.