Which Comes First?

There is no question in my mind that business excellence requires a motivated staff and clear expectations. At OPIE, we speak often of the three-legged stool of people, processes, and tools. It is true that you need all three to succeed, but is one more important than the other? I can debate with anyone that having any two of the three is insufficient for organizational excellence. But if I had to pick one of the three to focus on, which would it be?

I think the question of the highest importance can be effectively debated, but to get a good ranking, we need to add some context. We need to understand our assumptions and we need to know how we have defined organizational excellence. So let’s start there. To me, we have created organizational excellence when we have created a sustainable company that achieves its mission while meeting its profitability objectives. Sounds easy, right?

I hope we all know what it is like to have excellent people working with us. We can communicate our expectations and they will get the job done well. Unfortunately, we probably know what it is like when we have only adequate people working with us, too. This is where the process matters. I think we would all agree that excellent people will always perform with inadequate processes better than good people, and good people will always perform an inadequate process better than poor people.

Creating adequate processes, which means that they fully address the requirements of the task at hand, is hard. Most of us have processes, but I’ll bet you a dollar that very few of those processes are fully addressing the requirements of the task. The reason is simple…we have to weigh the time it takes to develop the process against all of the other things that compete for our time. This is fine as long as we have excellent employees who can accomplish the task. And even adequate processes require refinement. It’s a lot like patient documentation. You create a plan of care based on your original evaluation, but you might refine that plan of care as you learn more about that patient. Do you document your refinements? Shouldn’t you document your business processes in the same way?

The compelling reason for this is that sometimes we lose an excellent person and a new person comes in to do their job. Without those adequate processes, tasks are no longer completed in the manner to which we have become accustomed. The things we took for granted can no longer be counted on and ultimately, we find ourselves struggling to do the things that were second nature. Adequate processes can help fill the gap of the unknown unknowns.

OPIE’s Admin Bootcamp is designed to help accelerate the learning curve and help your admin team fill in some of those gaps. It is designed to share decades worth of knowledge in a practical way to get your practice back to the level of sustainability and success that you envision. They will learn about the best practice processes that have led many to success.