All businesses reach a point when their performance starts to decline. It can be for many different reasons, and sitting idle at a time like this, doing nothing, can be fatal for the business owners. Not reacting professionally to such a situation will destroy the entire business. Faced with a downturn in performance, the best way to improve your business is to plan and implement an improvement project.
Let’s take a look at some of the steps that you can incorporate in your business improvement project.
Analyse The Issues In The Existing System
First and foremost, you should very critically and objectively analyse the existing issues with your business. You cannot improve unless and until you know where the shortfalls lie. Once you have identified the issues you can classify them according to their importance level. The most critical issues need to be solved as a top priority. The scope of the review should not be limited to a single department or activity but should be carried out for all major aspects of the business.
Classification and Processes
Once you have analysed and classified all the major issues with your business, you should now pick out some of your most committed and efficient staff members who can join a ‘focus group’ or project team to help you out with different suggestions for the improvement process. Ideally, you should choose the most efficient and insightful staff. The focus group’s purpose would be to come up with the desired result and the direction that would lead to that result. At this stage, the entire change process should be articulated on paper and converted into action points, action owners and deadlines.
Delegate
Improvement can never be achieved without the involvement of all employees, from top to bottom. Once your managers have a proper direction, they can delegate the tasks to their subordinates. Hence individual departments or functions – e.g. marketing, finance – can improve their practices and collectively they would add a lot of value to the business enhancement.
Remove Bottlenecks
The least efficient person or technology can be considered as bottlenecks for the business. In order to carry on with your business’s improvement project, you must tackle all bottlenecks that are a hurdle in your way of success.
Never Miss Good Opportunities
Analysing existing issues and coming up with relevant solutions to internal problems is an integral part of a business improvement project, but that does not mean that you cannot improve your business from external opportunities as well. If you feel that there is a new trend or technology in the market that can help your business, that was not anticipated at the outset of the business improvement project, then you should definitely consider investing in that. Business enhancement needs to be dynamic.
Be Wary Of The Risks Involved
You will be faced with many issues and risks while you work hard to improve your business. You can only improve your business if you are willing to change some important aspects, which may be painful or difficult. Change is always resisted by organisational culture and by some (not all) employees. So before starting the improvement project, you should be wary of all the risks involved. And you should definitely have a backup (contingency plan) for each of your improvement processes.
For an impartial view of your business’s unexploited areas, contact Flourish to get your FREE Business Performance Assessment.