Marina Martin

Article / Updated 02-09-2023

This portion of your business efficiency project's execution plan involves identifying individual milestones and assigning them to the right team members. Here is a sample plan from a real-life scenario. List all required work and deliverables Compiling a master list of steps in a project requires thinking critically and in detail about the project. This list is key to the success of the project and should be a step-by-step path directly between the problem statement and the end result. A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) can help you assemble a complete list. To create one: Determine the major deliverables or products to be produced. Ask yourself, “What major intermediate or final products or deliverables must be produced to achieve the project’s objectives?” Items identified in the CRM scenario include the following: Final CRM recommendation statement Customized CRM Data import map Employee training program Divide each of these major deliverables in its component deliverables in the same manner. Choose any one of these deliverables to begin with. Ask, “What intermediate deliverables must I have so I can create the deliverable?” Example requirements for a final CRM recommendation statement include the following: CRM comparison matrix Completed demos for each potential CRM A review of materials for each potential CRM Divide each of these work pieces into its component parts. Ask, “What deliverables must I have in order to complete this?” In order to complete demos for each potential CRM, you must: Compile a list of available CRMs Determine initial selection criteria Schedule or request demos with each CRM But why stop here? You can break each of these items into finer detail and then break those pieces into even finer detail. Identifying all roles and responsibilities Whether you’re able to influence the people assigned to your project team, people are assigned to your team without your input, or you assume the role of project manager of an existing team, you need to confirm the skills, knowledge, and interest of your team members. You can determine the skills you currently have and those that you need by using a skills matrix, and then based on this matrix, make the assignments by using a human resources matrix. A skills matrix is a table that displays people’s proficiency in specified skills and knowledge, as well as their interest in working on assignments using those skills and knowledge. The left-hand column identifies skill and knowledge areas needed to complete the current project, and the top row lists people’s names. At the intersection of the rows and columns, you identify the level of each person’s particular skills, knowledge, and interests. For each person and skill intersection, you assign two numbers: a skill level (where 0 = no capability and 3 = advanced capability) and an interest level (where 0 = no interest and 1 = interest) in carrying out that skill. It is absolutely possible for someone to have a skill level of 0 and an interest level of 1. Depending on the situation, this can be a great way to benefit from an employee developing a new skill to contribute to the team. Based on the completed skills matrix, you can quickly determine which skillsets you have available within your team, and which you need to fulfill via additional team members, outside consultants, or some other source. Not being able to meet all the skill and knowledge needs of a project either becomes a constraint that you account for in the project plan, or a reason that the project cannot begin. CRM Skills Matrix Gabe Josh Robin Quinton Technical writing 2,1 1,0 2,1 2,1 CRM customization 0,0 0,0 0,0 0,1 Data cleansing 3,0 3,1 1,0 3,0 A human resources matrix is similar to a skills matrix. Down the left-hand side, you list each task from your Work Breakdown Structure. The column headings across the top row correspond to each team member. If a team role is not yet filled, list the role (for example, Accountant) as opposed to the person’s name. In each cell intersection, you put the number of hours it will take that person to complete the given task. One task may be assigned to multiple people, with the corresponding number of hours each separate person is expected to spend on that task in his own column. CRM Human Resources Matrix Gabe Josh Robin Quinton CRM Consultant Compile list of CRMs 0 0 0 0 6 Clean data export file 0 30 10 10 5 Record screencasts 29 0 17 9 13 When you understand the roles that have not been assigned to specific people and the number of hours each role is expected to carry out over the course of the project, you can then begin recruiting additional team members, posting a Request For Proposals (RFP), speaking to a recruiter, or otherwise doing what’s necessary to fill those spots.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Increasing your business efficiency can seem daunting, but in five relatively straight-forward steps you can get a handle on how to identify and eliminate costly inefficiencies. Measure where your business is today across spectrums such as finances, customer sentiment, product/service quality, and employee dawdling. Brainstorm and list potential inefficiencies (and potential solutions) across your organization. Quantify the potential impact of any proposed solutions may have on other sectors of the business. Set efficiency goals and corresponding projects to achieve them. Define and execute a clear project plan for reaching your goals.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Change is good, but it can also wreak havoc on an organization if not managed with thought and careful planning. Here are seven steps to managing change in any organization, efficiently. Assuage fears upfront. Top fears include being replaced, not being able to keep up with new skills, not having enough time/resources to adapt, and loss of quality. Invite everyone to the table. People complain less afterwards if they are given a chance to chime in upfront. Help others see themselves as change agents. Encourage ideas and innovations for improvement from every corner of the workforce. Be a guinea pig. Try new tools and processes yourself first to show your team that you have skin in the game, too. Plan for the future. If your change doesn’t stick, it’s not real change. Allow room for change. This means giving employees the time and tools they need to master new skills and ways of doing things. In other words, don’t just pile change on top of everything else. Don't forget your external communication. Outsiders and potential new players also need to know what your project is trying to achieve and how close it is to the goal.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

A great starting place for identifying inefficiencies in your business is to take baseline measurements across your organization, which you can then use like a road map to your inefficiencies. Working backward from each measurement, ask (or research) what contributes to that figure. Customer satisfaction scores, IT expenses, employee benefits, hours spent in meetings — every figure is worth investigating and reassessing. Measurements aren’t the only way to arrive at the issues your company needs to address. A single brainstorming session with employees can provide a treasure trove of potential projects to take on. Reviewing customer complaints, talking to vendors, or simply looking over the receptionist’s shoulders can also reveal inefficiencies to tackle. The Pareto Principle, named after the Italian engineer Vilfredo Pareto who developed the field of microeconomics, is the “law” that 80 percent of negative results are due to 20 percent of the inefficiencies. Identifying the inefficiencies that are making the biggest impact can lead to fast and tremendous improvements in efficiency across your organization. Finding solutions to the problems you recognize is a similar process. While measurements usually don’t lead you to both a problem and its solution simultaneously, all the other tactics – namely brainstorming and researching what potential solutions exist outside the organization’s realm of knowledge – can lead you there. Finding and selecting the right solution to an identified inefficiency is the start of a new project. Projects versus Six Sigma projects Six Sigma doesn’t work for — and for that matter, doesn’t officially accept — just any inefficiency as a project. For starters, Six Sigma wants big, flashy gains. If you’re not going to save 70 percent of costs or reduce over 70 percent of defects, it’s not a Six Sigma improvement. (This doesn’t mean it’s not still worth doing. It just means it’s not a Six Sigma project.) In Six Sigma, a project: Has a financial impact to EBIT (Earnings Before Income Tax) or NPBIT (Net Profit Before Income Tax) or a significant strategic value Produces results that significantly exceed the amount of effort required to obtain the improvement Solves a problem that is not easily or quickly solvable using traditional methods Improves performance by greater than 70 percent over existing performance levels When a particular problem is selected to become a potential Six Sigma project, it goes through a critical metamorphosis — first from a practical business problem into a statistical problem, then into a statistical solution, and, finally, into a practical solution. When you state your problem in statistical language, you ensure that you will use data, and only data, to solve it. Statistics force you to abandon gut feelings, intuition, and best guesses as ways to address your problems. Two Lean ways to find inefficiencies Lean provides a less-mathematical map to your inefficiencies, in fact, it literally provides a map in the form of a value-stream map. To construct your own map to efficiency, start in the upper-left corner with an initial input, such as steel rods, an HTTP request, or a customer order. Trace that input along the entire path it takes to become your final output, whether that be pistons, a PDF file, or a box of books. At each step, dig deep to find inefficiencies in the transformation process that input goes through. To take it a step further, you should question the mere existence of each step. The “5 Whys” exercise — asking “why” five times in succession — works great here for really understanding why each step is necessary (if it even is). One of the key takeaways is the idea of seven types of waste, known as muda. Reviewing a value-stream map seven times, each time from the perspective of identifying and eliminating a particular type of waste, is one highly effective way to uncover new inefficiencies. The seven wastes — a.k.a. TIM WOOD — are (unnecessary) transport, inventory (any inventory goes against the Lean way), (unnecessary) motion (such as reaching across yourself to grab a part), waiting, overproduction, overprocessing, and defects. Kaizen workshops To really draw out inefficiencies in a particular process, you can hold a Kaizen event. During this event, which may last just a few hours or extend for a number of days, all participants walk through a given process step-by-step at the place the process happens — often in slow motion. At every point, the process is analyzed for both waste and potential improvements. Scenes are reenacted with small changes to see their impact on the later parts of the operation. Although Kaizen events are time-consuming — no normal work is planned or expected during workshop time — they can also be far more revealing and productive than merely hypothetical reenactments. Taking it all in before trying to fix it In the beginning phases, you want to capture as many inefficiencies as you (or your team members) can recognize, and correspondingly capture every possible solution that comes up. As with all good brainstorming exercises, you can’t start vetting solutions and narrowing down options until you’re relatively sure your current list of options is complete.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The first step in addressing business efficiency is to get an idea of the issues you want to address, and then you have to state what sort of improvement you’re seeking. Not only does a goal provide context for determining an action plan — the steps to save $1,000 are often far different from the steps to save $100,000 — but it’s also the only way you can know when you finish a project and whether that project was a success. Although the process for reaching goals may vary, every efficiency-enhancing methodology from Lean to Six Sigma incorporates the same focus on setting goals that are easily understood across the organization. Define clear efficiency goals The best goal is one that an objective outsider can immediately understand and, more importantly, evaluate. Even if she has no background in the subject matter, this stranger should be able to clearly say whether the goal was met after hearing the goal and reviewing the associated data points. Vague or warm and fuzzy ideals, like “create a fun work environment” are good mission statements or company guidelines, but make for lousy goals because there’s no associated objective measure. If you want to measure fun in the workplace, you’d have to come up with your own metric system (Moh’s Scale of Fun, perhaps?) with data points you can measure, such as employee satisfaction scores on a survey, the number of social events held in a month, the number of attendees at optional social events (assuming that attendance at an optional event indicates employees are enjoying themselves), or pieces of flare. As you set your goals, make sure you’re consulting functional representatives who can speak to the feasibility of your objectives. For example, you wouldn’t want to set a goal to make the company website load in half the time without talking to someone knowledgeable from IT. You can and should also explore external resources for vetting your goal’s feasibility — perhaps internal IT support isn’t aware of certain speed-enhancing technologies that a consultant specializing in website enhancements can share. Types of efficiency goals Goals are multidimensional, and a variety of goals ensures that you are keeping an eye on the big picture and that a single point of failure does not necessarily stop you from succeeding in multiple other arenas. Your team may set goals relating to finances, sentiment (employee or customer — or even vendor!), product or service quality, speed of production or response times, employee or customer retention, knowledge gain and transfer, safety, or any other metric relevant to your organization. Strategies for choosing efficiency projects You need to set goals before selecting specific projects, because a project is largely defined by what it’s supposed to accomplish. You may also need multiple projects to achieve a set of goals, or often multiple projects to achieve one single goal. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to choose which project to tackle first. Strategies include picking those that save the most money, are easiest or fastest to complete, solve an obnoxious problem that aggravates employees, or are the hardest to accomplish (with the idea that getting the hard stuff out of the way can provide serious onward momentum for all subsequent work). You don’t need to tackle every goal all at once. Project selection doubles as a goal prioritizing process. Goals that won’t be addressed this time around get tabled until you have the resources to take on additional projects.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

An effective strategy for implementing change in your business means making the choices and adopting the tools and processes that generate the best results at the least cost for your business or organization. Cost here refers not to just dollars and cents, but also impacts on all other resources, including time and employee happiness. Too often, people focus on the financial aspects of efficiency while ignoring or underestimating the effects on other areas. You do not want to run or work at a business that focuses on cost savings above all else. Consider efficiency through the lens of a Pareto Improvement, named after Vilfredo Pareto. When you make a Pareto Improvement, you improve the situation of one person without negatively impacting anyone else. Giving John a higher salary without reducing anyone else’s salary or sacrificing someone else’s raise is a Pareto Improvement. If, however, you only had enough money to give either John or Mary a raise — so John’s raise comes at Mary’s expense — it is not a Pareto Improvement. More broadly, business efficiency is the application of Pareto Improvements in a way that considers not just individuals but also sectors of the business. A change is efficient if it increases customer service satisfaction without negatively impacting the IT or Finance departments. This is in opposition to the idea of a zero-sum game, wherein there is a finite resource and adding some to Person A by definition means taking some away from Person B. Some people view world safety as a zero-sum game — when the United States gains four nuclear missiles, it is four missiles safer, and every other country is relatively less safe. The terms efficiency and effectiveness are often used interchangeably, but they do not mean the same thing. A terribly inefficient process can still be quite effective. Effectiveness is how often a process gets to its stated end result. Walking and running are two effective ways to get to the store, but running may be more efficient given the circumstances. Efficiency is different for everyone In light of the definition given, it’s important to understand that there is no mathematical equation for efficiency that applies universally. Your organization’s specific goals, values, experiences, and resources all color whether a given choice is efficient or not. For example, if you run an organic dairy farm, it would never be efficient to give your cows daily antibiotics en masse. This would make your milk non-organic, and effectively lower your output to zero no matter how much actual milk was produced. If you are a non-organic dairy farm, however, then antibiotics may make perfect sense to lower your healthcare costs and bovine fatality rates. Additionally, resource costs are relative. Adopting the very latest technology is usually not the most efficient option for a low-tech business when it doesn’t have the employee skills to use it correctly or the in-house technical support to maintain it. Similarly, making one change that saves 30 minutes per employee per month may not make that much of a difference in a four-person firm, but would free up the equivalent of multiple additional employees if a 1,000-person firm made the same decision. Efficiency is sharing knowledge with others Efficiency enhancements rarely happen in a vacuum. Even enhancements that seem straightforward, such as reviewing a bank statement and realizing you are paying “too much” on equipment maintenance, rely on outside factors. There is no set correct amount to pay for equipment maintenance — what matters is what everyone else is paying for it, and how your business and its needs fall on that scale. There are always improvements to be had, new skills to learn, and new efficiency-enhancing technologies entering the market. There are experts who have been thinking about efficiency nonstop for over a decade and still learn new things every day. The business world is generally a secretive one. There is much concern about competitors gaining access to your customer base, stealing your best employees, or digging the secret sauce recipe out of the garbage can. But when it comes to efficiency improvements, there’s much to gain from sharing. In fact, if Motorola hadn’t shared its internal process for improving quality and cutting costs, Six Sigma would never exist. Same with Toyota and Total Quality Management. So the next time you’re at a Chamber of Commerce meeting or an industry trade show, don’t be shy about talking efficiency shop. Not only can sharing tips help build strong bonds with vendors and potential clients, but you’ll likely be surprised at the value of the ideas you hear in return.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

When you plan a business efficiency project, you need to know what you’d like to measure and how you’d like to go about measuring it — but where does all that data go, exactly? Depending on your business, you may need a single data repository, or, more likely, a few. Choosing the right place to post your data can have long-term ramifications on how easily you can access and manipulate your data in the future. Data storage options The following are your options for data storage: Excel: The tried-and-true resource for collecting and analyzing data, Excel is a no-frills application that can work for almost any company. Entering new data directly into Excel is generally too manual a process for most businesses — you shouldn’t be running order fulfillment out of a spreadsheet tab — but with the right training, you can perform most any calculation on your existing data. CRM: Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, software has come a long way from serving as a mere electronic address book. Cloud-based CRM systems like Salesforce.com, Zoho, and SugarCRM are basically customizable blank slates that can store, sort, and perform basic reporting functions on data as diverse as patient medication refill schedules to historical inventory fulfillment records. Many organizations can store the majority of their information in their CRMs, and use Excel to perform more advanced forecasting and calculations. Off-the-shelf software: Some companies have made it their sole focus to create software titles that correctly and efficiently measure core business data. For example, you may load historical financial and commission data into Quickbooks accounting software, while you use an inventory management service to track order fulfillment. Proprietary software: If you have unique enough business needs, developing your own custom software can be the best choice for collecting and processing internal data. However, this route is only advised if you have the in-house technical knowledge and skills to develop and maintain it. Outsourcing your core business software can cause irrevocable harm to your business if the external IT staff disappears, moves on, or simply doesn’t have a strong grasp of your needs. Questions for storing data When choosing a data storage repository, ask yourself the following questions: How easily can I get data in? If it takes seven screens to enter an order, you’ll aggravate employees, slow response times, and risk inaccurate data as people seek ways to skirt the system. How easily can I get data out? No single system lasts forever or meets 100 percent of your business needs. You need to be able to extract all your data into a non-proprietary format like .csv or .txt files at any time. What integration options exist? The best repositories are versatile, with options to integrate with other systems. Look for systems with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which mean a programmer or other software company can write code to let the system update and exchange data with other repositories. How secure is my data? Even if your industry does not require a certain level of data security, like with credit card details or healthcare records, it never hurts to choose the most secure system possible. Look for SAS 70 II compliance, the highest level of security available for commercially available software systems. Should you merge your data? At first it may seem that the best way to analyze your data is to get all of it into the same system, whether that be an Excel spreadsheet or a CRM. Resist this urge. While it may make sense to move data from disparate systems into a single repository, this often leads to double data entry, unnecessary work, and/or hackneyed software “hooks” that detract from the integrity of your functional needs at the expense of your measuring requests. Instead, focus on complementary data sources. For example, customer order details may fit best in Salesforce.com, while your customer acquisition expenses are in Quickbooks. Technical or security barriers may prevent you from a full-blown sync between the two systems, and even if you can sync, neither system may have robust enough reporting capabilities. At this point, too many organizations turn to the dreaded Data Entry approach in order to get out an accurate customer acquisition cost figure. A better solution is to design a report containing all the right data in the right order in each system that is exportable to CSV, and then create an Excel template that performs the necessary calculations on this combination of reports. You can continue to input customer orders and internal costs as normal, and it will just take a couple minutes to export the right data into the right place when you need it.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Technological resources can help any business or organization become more effective. There are some overarching resources that most any business can use to increase productivity and decrease waste, including: A content management system (CMS): Gone are the days when you need to pay a Web developer an hour’s wage to swap out a sentence on your company website or bold some text. Most websites now integrate a CMS to some degree, which allows users with no HTML or programming experience to edit written content on the website just as they would in a word processor. Popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. A customer relationship manager (CRM): Originally little more than fancy address books, today’s CRMs are powerhouses of efficiency. You can use them to send and track e-mail marketing campaigns, print mailing labels, track customer support cases, send product warranty reminders, sync with your order fulfillment department, and much more. Even psychiatrists can customize their CRMs to track patient medication schedules, getting alerts when high-risk patients didn’t refill by a particular date. Top CRM platforms include Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and BatchBook. A central file server: E-mailing multiple versions of a document around to employees gets complicate and inefficient really fast. Instead, use a central file storage repository to make it easy for anyone to find the document they’re looking for and to handle version control for often-revised files. Aside from running your own server in the office, which usually requires on-site IT resources, check out Google Drive or Dropbox.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Originally codified at Motorola in the 1980s, Six Sigma is a business efficiency process that relies on quantified performance measurements and a strong managerial team and buy-in. The term Six Sigma is often used interchangeably with a Six Sigma performance (3.4 or fewer defects per million opportunities) or a Six Sigma improvement (efficiency gains of 70 percent or greater). Six Sigma in a nutshell The key differentiations of the Six Sigma approach include: Setting a mathematical focus: If you cannot measure it numerically, it’s not a Six Sigma project. Saving, not avoiding, costs: Six Sigma calculations don’t account for avoiding costs in the future, only for lowering existing costs. Having big ambitions: A “Six Sigma improvement” is an improvement of at least 70 percent. Six Sigma is not designed for small gains here and there. Focusing on quality: At its base, Six Sigma is focused on the ruthless elimination of defects and variation throughout a production process and in a final result. Bringing everyone on board: More than other methodologies, Six Sigma has many clearly defined roles for employees across an organization, ranging from Yellow, Green, and Black Belts to Champions, functional representatives, and deployment leaders. Believing in determinism: Six Sigma relies on the belief that your organization is responsible for its own defects, which is great — because then your organization is fully capable of remedying them! The Six Sigma formula The basis of Six Sigma is the following formula: y = f(x) + ε In this equation, y is your end result (such as the finished product you sell). The x refers to your original inputs, which you transform or otherwise manipulate to turn into the finished product. (You may have more than one x in your process.) The function f() is the transformational process. Finally, the ε refers to the errors throughout the process. Six Sigma is all about eliminating or minimizing the ε. Six Sigma is best for organizations that are fully committed to improvement, manufacturing companies, Type-A personalities, large companies, and organizations that communicate well.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Born at Toyota, Lean is a lighter, leaner business strategy to achieve wanted results. A Lean process for business efficiency is ruthless about getting rid of not just errors, but also steps, processes, and people that don’t ultimately add value to your end product or service. Less structured and mathematical than Six Sigma, but with a similar focus on customer needs and reducing defects, Lean is all about getting as close as possible to a waste-free process that results in maximum customer value. Lean in a nutshell The key differentiations of Lean include the following: Focus on the customer: Lean is almost religious about listening to the voice of the customer, or VOC. If a step doesn’t add value to the end product from the customer’s point of view, Lean strips it out. Weeding out waste: There are seven types of waste, or muda, in Lean, and much attention is paid to eliminating them. Just-in-time attitude: In Lean, it’s a waste to produce anything in anticipation of customers’ desires. Instead, you produce only when you have orders in hand. Visual representations: As opposed to the mathematical approach of Six Sigma, Lean uses value-stream maps to visually draw out processes. While a right-brained, list-oriented person can construct a value-stream map with basic text, it’s also possible to draw beautiful value-stream maps if they help to communicate better. The seven wastes of Lean There are seven kinds of waste that Lean focuses on eliminating: transport, waiting, overproduction, defects, inventory, motion, and extra processing. Lean is best for incremental improvements, organizations that focus on their people and culture, and companies that want a less mathematical and more flexible approach than Six Sigma. There’s also a blended methodology known as Lean Six Sigma, though it is not necessarily a perfect marriage of the two processes. In fact, many professionals argue that by trying to use both simultaneously, you lose the best of both. This is probably true if you are using a strict Six Sigma or Lean approach, but if you are like many organizations and only using a portion of one or the other, then it can be beneficial to see what the other has to offer. For example, you can strive for a breakthrough Six Sigma improvement by eliminating waste Lean-style.