Having a stable and documented process is one of the most important things you can do to improve productivity, efficiency, and ultimately, profit.

If your process has been established, several things become easier:

1) Starting new jobs

Your process should include how to start a job and the information you need to do so. It may be as simple as sending a project manager the important details and watching the process begin without any more intervention.

2) Reporting

You will always know when to make and where to send reports. Also, your reports can comment on where you are in the process, making them short and to the point. There’s plenty of room in such a report for additional comments and concerns.

3) Training

It’s all written down, and the more your new worker follows the same steps, the faster they become proficient. It’s also easy for the worker to ask questions, since the process is well known.

4) Increasing Productivity

Since your people have a process, they aren’t wasting time trying to figure out HOW to do something in the first place. Your workers can follow this process until they get faster, at which point maybe they can handle two projects at once. And your planners and managers can spend time looking for new leads or work, or working on improving what you have.

5) Setting prices and dates

Once you have run through a process, you see what it takes to complete the job. You have an idea of how much time and money it takes to finish. So when you are talking to your newest client and he asks for a general price/timeline, you have it. You will need to learn to scale it, of course, but you have a baseline number.

6) Reacting to surprises.

Even if something isn’t covered in your day-to-day processes, they can still help you. They should detail who needs to decide about what… if the client suddenly wants to change technologies, for example, you probably have named the tech leader for the project. It’s his job to decide how to proceed. If your live build goes out and crashes the live server, you already know who to have look at the problem while your backups of the previous build are reposted and the server is restarted. You don’t waste time trying to find out IF you have backups and which developer should be looking at the code.

7) Adapting and learning

Your processes can’t cover every possibility, but they should be able to make sure that you have the right people on hand for any issue. And once you overcome such a surprise, the information you gained won’t be lost… it will be put into the process for the next time. Updating the processes is the best way to keep them valuable and useful.

8) You’ll be able to handle more and bigger projects

Your people will quickly become more experienced and faster at their jobs, leading to your company handling more and larger projects, because your underlying structures are in place, and it’s just a matter of scaling up. This directly increases your income.

It takes some time and effort to create and document processes, but in the medium to long term, it can greatly improve your efficiency. You will have more successes than failures. Your projects will run faster and smoother, allowing you to finish more work in less time. Your clients will notice how well the work went, and word will get around that you know what you are doing. A reputation of excellence is an invaluable asset in the workplace today.

Your reputation will attract clients and your fast, efficient work will keep them. This is a vital step on the path to profit.

- Robert Quattrone, Budget Manager