Claim OwnershipOptimize For Outcomes - The Podcast
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Do you need help scaling your business? What about hiring and managing employees?Are you implementing technology to streamline your business? Do you have problems you're trying to solve? If you answered yes to any of the above, you can benefit from learning to Optimize For Outcomes. With a base in systems thinking, process improvement and a 20 year technical consulting corporate career, I'm sharing the most important knowledge for growing and managing a business successfully. Applying systems thinking to your business will help it get more effective, efficient, and productive. I cover the mental models and methodologies that will help your business make more while spending less while saving time. https://www.optimizeforoutcomes.com/systems-thinking-blog/ has written versions of all full-length podcasts. Visit https://www.optimizeforoutcomes.com/services/ to understand how we can help you with your business.
50 Episodes
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Hey everyone! This is a quick update on the last couple of months and an update on plans for future episodes.
In this episode, I cover a system that you can use in your business for interviewing prospective employees or contractors. I cover how to prepare for the interview including identifying the must haves and nice to haves. I talk through organizing questions and how to structure questions to get more meaningful answers. I give a few examples from actual interviews that I did. This one is about twice as long as usual, but I didn't want to leave anything out or split it in half.The written version of this with the mentioned summary can be found at https://www.optimizeforoutcomes.com/how-to-interview-potential-employees-or-contractors-a-systems-thinking-approach/.
Hiring the right resources in your business is one of the most important activities you can do. Do it right and you'll be able to achieve more than you could ever imagine. Do it wrong and your team or business will stagnate at best. In this episode, I cover the key steps in getting the people resources you need including long-term employees, contractors, freelancers, and vendors. Here's a link to a related resource mentioned in this video - a course on how to perform a time study - https://resources.optimizeforoutcomes.com/product/time-study/
One of the most important things you do as a leader is to identify and bring people resources into your business. This week is an introduction to People Lifecycle Management. I introduce the four phases of managing people in your business and lay the foundation for deep dives into each of the phases in the coming four weeks.Learning how to hire, rewire, inspire, and retire people is critical to growing and scaling your business beyond the solo entrepreneur phase.
Change Management is an important part of any optimization work that you do in your business. People have a tendency to revert to old habits. Even when a change is beneficial, people can slide back to doing things "the old way." Change management helps you proactively address this concern and helps you ensure that any changes you make will become new habits that last.
If you want to get more efficient and/or grow your business or team, learning how to automate business processes is critical to reaching that outcome. I will sequence how you can approach automating business processes and give you some pointers on things to do and things to avoid. Having this lightweight framework will give you a mental model for thinking through the core steps to automating a business process in an effective and efficient manner.
If you want to improve business processes, a simple mental model can help you with your approach.Eliminate, Consolidate, Automate Eliminate the things you're doing that aren't helping you achieve your desired outcomes or adding value to the Customer. Consolidate like "things" in your business into a single process to manage them. Automate your business processes, removing manual work and giving your business scale that it otherwise couldn't get.
A SIPOC is a process improvement tool that you can use to map a business process. SIPOC is an acronym that stands for Supplier, Input, Process Step, Output, Customer. Use it to map these attributes of a business system. You can then use this information to identify changes to make to improve your system. I've added some additional elements to the SIPOC to increase its usability and value in process improvement work.
You can better manage your employees using swimlane diagrams. A swimlane diagram is going to help you understand the dynamics between different roles in your business or team and help you identify potential problems or conflicts.You're also going to gain perspective on the work the team is actually doing which you can use for goal setting and career planning.Visit People Management - Optimize For Outcomes to learn how I can help you better manage employees in your company.
Use a swimlane diagram to document your processes. Draw lanes left to right for each person or tech in a process and then draw out each step in the process and put it in the swimlane for the person or tech responsible for that tech. This will help you see and understand where handoffs are happening in your process as well as rework and process loops. All of these are big areas of inefficiency that you can then address with systems thinking and process improvement tools which will help you scale with less waste.
Here are four different applications you can use to draw swimlane diagrams. Each has its own benefits, so weigh what's right for you and your business and make a decision. MS Visio - very powerful and tightly integrated with Microsoft's other productivity apps. It's not part of Office though and requires additional licenses which might be cost-prohibitive. Google Drawings - Google's free drawing application which has many of the features of MS Visio and all of Google's pros/cons for their productivity apps. Lucidchart - SaaS-based drawing application that has lots of useful features and functionality. It is paid, but they do have a free tier that allows you to see the software before committing to spending money. MS PowerPoint - This shouldn't be your first choice, but MS PowerPoint does have the ability and functionality to draw swimlane diagrams. I mention it because many already pay for Office so this is an application you might already have.
A swimlane diagram is a tool that you can use to get a detailed view of a process in your business. It's used when you need a deeper understanding of a process than a process narrative can provide. It's useful when trying to get more efficient with your process or as training documentation for new employees. Oftentimes, just by creating a swimlane diagram of a process, you'll see 2-3 things you can do immediately to make the process better.This podcast references a diagram that can be seen on the Optimize For Outcomes website at https://www.optimizeforoutcomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Restaurant-Seating-scaled.jpeg
If you manage employees in your business, add root cause analysis to the way you think Doing root cause analysis can help you better understand performance issues and solve any problem you're facing while managing people. You'll understand the problems on a deeper level and come up with better solutions, saving you time, energy, and money in the long run.
How can root cause analysis help your business grow? Growing a business, you need to get effectiveness and efficiency right first. To do that, you have to solve problems that are preventing effectiveness and efficiency. Use the 5 whys to get to root causes of problems and solve the problems that really matter.
Using technology can help you do root cause analysis in your business. Keep in mind that a root cause analysis is more about thinking, so the best tools are things you can use to give reminders to ask follow-up questions.
Root Cause Analysis is a way of thinking to help you look beyond surface level symptoms and solve problems at a deeper level. This will save you time, energy, and money which will make it easier for you to grow your business and build for the long term. You'll solve the right problems faster and with better solutions than if you treat surface-level symptoms that are causing your business issues. While there are many tools to help you do this, I focus primarily on understanding the five whys as a mental model for doing root cause analysis.
Understanding the difference between effectiveness and efficiency is critical for improving your business. If you don't do this, you won't know how to fix the problems that are preventing your growth and preventing you from achieving your desired outcomes.
If you want to grow your business successfully, you need to work on your effectiveness and efficiency before trying to scale.Businesses that don't do this will run into problems quickly, and those problems will be major roadblocks to any growth.
Using technology to survey Customers is a great way to understand the effectiveness of your products. For internal business systems, most software has built-in metrics that will give you an understanding of the effectiveness of the system using the software.
| Effectiveness and Efficiency are often misunderstood. In business, knowing the difference can be the difference between your business growing or remaining stagnant.I talk through examples of scaling, using technology to better understand your effectiveness and efficiency, and how to think about the effectiveness and efficiency of how your business hires employees.Thanks for listening! Any questions or feedback can be sent to me at brian@optimizeforoutcomes.com
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