Being agile is considered a positive trait in business. In fact, based on the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Forbes Insights Report from 2017, 92% of C-level executives believe organizational agility is crucial for a business to thrive. We praise being able to adapt quickly to the ever-changing business landscape.
All organizations should learn how to evolve or else they will fall behind. If you want to earn the reputation of being number one in the market, other than being agile and solving bigger problems like innovation, you must first focus on making your processes more predictable.
Why Increasing Process Predictability Matters
If you want to uphold a specific reputation, you have to be consistent. To achieve consistency, organizations must make their processes predictable. You have to deliver your product and/or services the same way, the right way, every time. According to SuperOffice, 87% of customers think companies should strive harder at delivering a consistent experience.
Making your business operations predictable reduces churn rate while increasing customers’ trust in your organization. Increasing predictability also helps you build and maintain customers for life. When your customers know they will get the same high-quality service/product all the time, they are more likely to become loyal customers.
On top of that, your employees will have more confidence in their job when processes are clearly defined and predictable, boosting their morale. Predictability also gives your company a sense of higher reliability. Having these traits will help your business thrive despite the uncertainty or changes in the market.
Moreover, implementing predictability in businesses is necessary for reasons such as cost control, inefficiencies, competition and ineffectiveness of processes, to mention a few.
How to Create a More Predictable Business
Standardize your processes.
Standards exist not to control or force compliance: they exist to ensure the same level of quality is delivered the same way every time. Standardizing business processes creates a uniform blueprint for accomplishing a task so that whenever it comes up at whatever stage of the operations in any department, the task can be performed with the least ambiguity.
When you standardize your processes, you make them repeatable and predictable. You consistently deliver the same level of quality every single time. This is how you can succeed in earning a reputation of being number one in your industry.
I’ll be sharing more about how you can successfully standardize your processes in a separate blog, so stay tuned for more on this in the future!
Change as one.
Aside from standardizing your business processes, you must also set a standard way to improve. An important part of creating business predictability is making changes or improvements as a company, instead of doing it by department. This is what we call one-team alignment: changing processes as a company and allocating resources to change those initiatives at the same time so everyone is aware of what’s going on. Essentially, team alignment can be defined as taking disparate changes and streamlining processes throughout the entire company.
Remember that the success of standardizing your processes ultimately depends on the people behind them. With team alignment, everyone in the organization is educated on the whole workflow. They see where they fit into the big picture and clearly understand their roles and responsibilities. It’s easier for them to do their part in delivering the same level of quality work all the time.
You can’t predict the future, as there will always be uncertainty in the market… But you can make your business so reliable and predictable that your customers, stakeholders and employees know that your organization will deliver on its promise no matter what happens.
In love and respect,
Hilary Corna
