How to Spot Inefficient Workflows Early

How to Spot Inefficient Workflows Early

The longer inefficiencies are able to persist, the greater their impact will be. If a daily task that could be completed in ten minutes is allowed to take twenty, then you might have thrown away sixty hours by the end of the year – and that’s before we factor in the mental energy wasted.

The earlier we can spot ways to make a workflow more efficient, the better. But spotting inefficiencies isn’t always straightforward. Let’s take a look at how it might be done.

Identifying the symptoms of friction

The first step is to simply observe work being done. This is easiest when you’re monitoring the workflows of other people. Where are recommended practices being dispensed with, and why? It might be that the official way of doing things is actually holding you back. In some cases, you might look at the correlation between performance and effort – as measured via metrics like self-reported exhaustion, absenteeism, and deteriorating performance over the course of a day. If certain teams and individuals are achieving great results with sustainable, or even modest effort, then it might be that their methods might provide a model worth paying attention to.

Analyzing communication overload

Certain uses of time are notorious for being wasteful, in just about every kind of organization. If team leaders are constantly having to explain themselves, then this might be taken as an indication that the status of a project is insufficiently clear.

Similarly, the volume of repeated queries coming through collaboration platforms like Slack might indicate whether centralized resources are providing the required information in a way that’s transparent. What matters is that we understand where clarity is lacking, and intervene to correct the problem, and thereby reduce the amount of unnecessary ‘clarification’ gumming up the system.

Reviewing remote access and security hurdles

If your team is distributed, then you might face security concerns that don’t apply to teams that are working together in the same location. Staff who are logging on from remote locations should be expected to adhere to certain procedures and principles, but this should come at minimal cost when it comes to speed and efficiency. Often, you can keep everyone connected without the need for complex login hurdles. The solution usually takes the form of a business VPN.

Spotting repetitive manual intervention

In many cases, human involvement in a system is a result of two tools being insufficiently integrated. If human beings are spending hours every week copying data from a spreadsheet to an email, or renaming files manually, then this might be taken as a sign that automation is required. Often, a simple Python script is all that’s required to free up thousands of hours.