Years ago, a friend of mine was rewarded/punished by being asked to lead our company’s ISO 9001 certification process. He dutifully started learning everything he could about about Quality Management and went off to ISO 9001 training. After he came back and was working on setting things up, I had lunch with him and we discussed his training and what he had been working on. He told me ISO 9001 is easy. There are only 3 steps.
Say what you do
Do what you say
Make it better
That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing there to say what your process should be. Nothing that says how a process is created. It simply says that you need to have a documented process that is followed with opportunities to improve it.
Let’s look at the first two steps. They are very straightforward. “Say what you do” -Document your process. Not what you wish your process could be. Not what you’re trying to make your process into. But simply what is your current process. “Do what you say” - Follow your process. These are very straight forward and should be easy. Now there is a lot of work required in determining which processes need to be documents, ensuring they are documented and validating that the processes are being followed, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now.
I’m interested in the third step. For this is where innovation comes in. Innovation doesn’t have to be creating a brand new product or a new algorithm that will change the world. Innovation can simply be making an existing process better. You can’t really start on making a process better until you have documented the process and everyone is following it because without steps 1 & 2, there is no way to know if an idea is making things better. But once you are ready for improvement, this should be the engine that drives your company to better quality, better results and better employees.
The improvements don’t have to be huge changes. Even simple changes can make things better. One team had a couple developers who liked coming in a little later and would occasionally miss stand up. So we changed the process to push stand up back an hour and that made everyone happier. The late developers didn’t feel rushed and the other developers didn’t feel frustrated that the late developers were missing meetings. Another team added important customer events to the sprint calendar so that we could make sure to place risky changes where they were less likely to hurt a customer.
Two things to keep tabs on. First is that anyone can come up with an idea, but it should be the people doing the process who determine if the idea will be implemented. The people who are involved in a process should be the ones who control what changes are made to a process. Second is that there should be some metrics to determine whether or not a change is “better”. It can be happier developers. It can be less risk to customer. Or it could be faster cycle times. Change is made just to make changes, there should be a reason to make the change and a hypothesis which is tested against with the change. These are the types of innovative changes that every team can do and will make companies a lot more successful. And it will only take you 3 steps to get there.