Process efficiency doesn’t have to be at the expense of personal growth or career development.
What separates a thriving business from a struggling concern? Is it simply a matter of profitability, liquidity, and/or shareholder value? Or are there other telling indicators that, although absent from the income statement, are a sure-fire signal that your business is resilient enough to weather economic downturns, financial upheaval, or competitor growth?
Let’s think about a culture of psychological safety, intelligent people and/or resource allocation, effective employee training, automation accuracy … and the list goes on and on. The building blocks of operational efficiency are numerous and well-documented.
Operational efficiency is all about reducing waste, resources, time, and effort while still producing a high-quality service or product. If we take a granular approach and start unpacking things like labour productivity, throughput, turnaround time, and task allocation, it is easy to let the process get the better of the people.
So, as we scurry to streamline, rationalize, and fine-tune, how do we reduce the risk of marginalizing or neglecting the development of our people?
The low-down of IPO
Everything we do at Mint supports our mission: we create tomorrow by inspiring our employees, clients, partners and community to reach their full potential through innovative technology solutions.
What has that got to do with process efficiency, career development, and personal growth, and how do you link them all together? I hear you ask. Well, let me introduce you to Mint’s internal use of the IPO methodology.
Mint’s IPO strategy makes use of Robert Simons’ Levers of Control model to drive performance. These levers are: beliefs systems, boundary systems, interactive control systems, and diagnostic control systems.
These systems are utilized as a framework to remove uncertainty, establish crystal clear roles and responsibilities, and find the right balance between managing, leading and controlling our business.
- Belief systems formulate the basic values, standards, and beliefs of our organization and provide inspiration, direction, and local guidance for all our employees.
- Boundary systems focus our company and create process efficiency by ensuring people don’t spend time investigating and developing new opportunities or any other input to the organization that are not in line with the business strategy.
- Interactive control systems create meaningful and purposeful conversations across the company and focus on innovation, to potentially address strategic uncertainties and change our strategy accordingly. At Mint, we have created various ‘rooms’ to facilitate these conversations. Our Deal Room opens discussions around evaluating our deals and our customer frameworks. Our Talent Room is used to closely monitor our ‘Minties’ (our people) and ensure they are engaged and fulfilled. While our Engine Room is used to assess our projects and maintain a high standard of delivery for our customers.
- Diagnostic control systems allow us to communicate our business strategy and set and support clear targets and accountability. As part of our IPO, we use carefully constructed critical performance variables to clearly define required outcomes.
Mint’s IPO approach means that every process is scoped, agreed upon and documented. This means that there are no guessing games for our employees who aspire to more senior roles or a career change. A customized job description containing all functions and expectations allows for the identification of gaps and learning curves so you can expand your knowledge and map your career to fulfill aspirational goals.
A key part of the work for our clients is to ensure we “drink our own champagne” and also strive to improve and disrupt current ways of work to provide best-of-breed processes, technology, and people solutions. Our transformation to drive “Pre-Configured Online Assessments” for prospective customers began four years ago, but more recently we heavily invested in a cutting-edge platform to take people growth, process efficiency, and technology disruption to the next level.
There’s a platform for that
One of Mint’s strategic partners, Seer 365, has built its business around significantly reducing overall project risk and improving time to value, whilst balancing key man dependency with technology and increasing quality.
Seer 365’s GYDE365 platform simplifies, automates, and accelerates the Microsoft Dynamics 365 system selection, analysis, and design process by augmenting the ‘people-only’ approach the market is accustomed to.
As an expert in process refinement, Seer 365 understands the value of technology and tools to get the job done. But the company also realizes that people are an integral part of the success of any project.
“When a business makes the decision to utilize our platform, they trigger a period of change within their organization. The traditional way in which they engaged with their customers, will undergo a significant shift. However, this transformation, much like the digital transformation journey that many customers are on when looking to implement new business applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, once embedded, will ultimately provide significant benefits to both implementation partners and their customers,” explains Seer 365’s Chief Executive Officer, Sam Dharmasiri.
“The pace of technology and the customer’s appetite to realize a return on investment in the shortest possible timeframe can only be met if forward-thinking organizations such as Mint embrace this change throughout the organization. We recognize that this transformation requires support, which is why we provide continual training, certifications and sales, and delivery support as part of our solution, to ensure that process improvement is accompanied by career enrichment and, ultimately, a more efficient, effective workplace. Our platform should be seen as a value-add to sales and delivery teams, enabling employees to achieve more with a better work-life balance, rather than a dilution of their responsibilities.”
In conclusion
When leading people, it is our responsibility to not only ensure clarity in their roles through rigorous process mapping, role definitions, and controls but to also push the envelope through driving digital transformation internally to differentiate our employees for the benefit of us as the employer, employee themselves, our partners and ultimately our clients.