Understanding Your Vision Part 1: Being able to Define your Business Processes
June 29, 2006 – 9:05 pmI’ve run into people when developing projects and I have to tell you that the most important thing is having a “micro-view” of your businesses operations. There is nothing worse than not fully understanding how your business works… and well… that’s pretty much the worst thing I can think of. Think of it, you work on your business over months or years and you cannot fully put into words just how the processes in place work for your business or for that matter don’t work. Naturally as technology moves to the forefront of just about every business and we have become further and further removed from the actual process of having to think about how things in our business work because the thinking has already been done…press a button and bang! You’re done!
Defining your business processes involves asking the following questions….
- How does that work?
- What do I do if this doesn’t work?
- What does that do?
- Why do I even need this?
- When is this applicable to a certain process?
Mind you those are just a few general and vague questions. The real point of those generic questions is to get you to start pulling apart how certain existing processes in your business do or don’t work for your business? Why is this so important you may be asking? Well in optimizing your business is where you find truly simple and yet excellent ideas that you may have forgotten about, not seen or just haven’t realized yet. Also, it allows you to discuss this with your developer, programmer, accountant, lawyer, business partner or even the general public when they ask you about your business and acts as a way to adding greater profits to your business in the long run. Have a read of Steve Pavlina’s Article about a “$10,000 hour” I think you’ll find the concept interesting.
I will post a follow-up article about this to show some ways to break down process though into simpler ways of looking at aspects of your business.
Lucas