Before designing business processes, we must recognize that poorly defined processes waste enormous amounts of time and resources. The question is: what can we do once we recognize this and want to change how our organization operates?
The first step in process design is to try to answer the following questions for most tasks:
Who?
Once we know which administrative tasks we plan to delegate and to whom, we need to consider whether we are assigning each task to the right person. Naturally, some decisions are straightforward: the accountant handles invoices, while the cleaner cleans the office; trying to reverse these roles would make little sense. However, whenever we assign tasks to colleagues, we should ensure that everyone involved clearly understands their responsibilities, deadlines, working methods, and our expectations.
It is equally important that, beyond having the necessary skills, colleagues have some intrinsic motivation to perform most of their tasks. In other words, we should distribute less appealing tasks as evenly as possible among team members, saving ourselves considerable difficulties later. This brings us to the next important question:
What?
Simply saying that everyone should do what they are good at may not be enough to answer this question. The main reason is that working together can reveal specific skills, exceptional performance, or weaknesses that require us to reconsider how tasks are allocated.
In every situation, however, it is important to remember that we are all different—even exceptionally competent, motivated, and diligent employees. Despite the best intentions, what an employee delivers may differ from what the employer expects. This is why every assigned task needs a consistent, predefined procedure that must be followed in exactly the same way each time. These procedures—the business subprocesses associated with individual tasks—can even be developed together with employees, since a specialist may have a much deeper and more comprehensive understanding of a particular task than the company leader. The key is to reach a consensus—or even a compromise—that allows the procedure to be documented and tracked in a system. Once this has been established and is demonstrably working, it may be worth refining these procedures based on feedback to make operations even more efficient: achieving the same result faster, with fewer resources and higher quality.
When?
Timing is perhaps the most important issue in business administration, as we often have to meet statutory deadlines or face penalties. In such cases, something must be completed by each deadline, which means carrying out one or more interconnected sequences of activities to achieve the desired result. This is where internal deadlines become important: setting a 15-day deadline for handling a matter is not enough if several preliminary steps are required. The deadline for submitting accounting documents is one example. Even when the deadline is fixed, a series of activities must be completed beforehand: we need to issue all invoices and pay VAT, and we may also need to collect all incoming invoices or employee attendance sheets if our accountant handles payroll as well. Taking just one of these activities—paying VAT—we can see that even this subtask consists of several steps, such as calculating total VAT and deducting input VAT.
If even one of these steps is not completed on time, the entire objective is at risk: we will be unable to submit our return by the deadline and will incur a penalty. This is why these activities should be planned comprehensively and in this level of detail, while also keeping efficiency in mind.
Why?
Setting priorities is perhaps the most important consideration here, since achieving any objective can provide an answer: task or subtask X must be completed so that objective Y can be achieved. At the same time, particularly when working on several parallel workstreams, we also need to determine the order in which tasks should be completed based on their importance. This prevents critical activities from being left unfinished because less important tasks have taken precedence.
Above all, these priorities must be communicated to employees clearly, precisely, and preferably in writing as well. This ensures they understand expectations and strive to meet them. Otherwise, even without bad intentions or genuine negligence, employees may set priorities that differ from what actually matters to the company. As a result, expectations go unmet, problems arise, and conflicts may develop.
How?
We have left one of the most time- and energy-intensive questions until last: how should individual tasks be performed? As mentioned earlier, it is essential to define employees' tasks and the methods for completing them precisely, ideally during their initial training. This enables employees to carry out their work in line with our expectations and understand its importance and place within the organization. Beyond this—and perhaps most importantly—customers will consistently experience high-quality service and a visibly well-run business whenever they buy from us.
This strengthens the company's credibility and reliability, making customers much more likely to choose us for their next purchase rather than take their business to competitors. In turn, our marketing and sales costs decrease, allowing us to generate more profit.
Summary
Answering these questions requires considerable thought and extensive planning from most people within the organization. It is therefore important to coordinate the entire planning process with the right expertise and patience.
If we find these questions difficult to answer or struggle to identify the next steps, seeking professional support is certainly worthwhile.
At Click On, this is precisely why we always complement our software solution with implementation support and comprehensive assistance, ensuring the success of the processes introduced.
