When it comes to projects, your business or creating products, there is an effective to way to approach achieving your desired result and there are ineffective ways. It typically comes down to how you look at the project at the beginning. How do you decide where to start?
Before I get into where to start, let me briefly touch on the ineffective practices that plague business owners in completing their business objectives and their other projects. Maybe one of these approaches resonates with you.
The first ineffective practice is taking all of the pieces that are needed to complete a project or to run a business and start working on these particular items without any regard for the other pieces of the project and with no specific flow of getting things done. The other lacking component is a clear vision. I call this the shotgun approach where you just spray some effort to see what happens.
The second ineffective practice is to start a process and work on it all the while hoping for a specific outcome to emerge from your efforts. I call this “The Field of Dreams”. You know, if you build it, they will come. Except for they don’t come and you just wasted time, money and effort on it. Using “The Secret” won’t help you here either.
Those two scenarios sound ridiculous but I see a project or business run like this all of the time. This is because most business owners don’t think in terms of process flow they think in terms of ideas.
So what’s the solution?
I have to thank my daughter for recently reminding of this particular rule that comes from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits and we reintroduced to me through a book I read with my daughter often which is the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Kids. The habit is start with the end in mind.
Before we start any project or business. We always think about what we want to achieve by doing and what do we want the end user to achieve. Sometimes this is a collaborative process. In fact we don’t like to assume that we know what people want so we ask. We also love to get feedback from our team as well as they always have great insight into how we can make the project or business idea better.
Once we have a decent idea of what we want to achieve then we move to the start and look at all of the steps that are needed to complete the project as well as resources that are needed such as timeframe, people and money.
At this point we are also looking at what we know we don’t know and deciding how to address specific known blind spots for our team.
Creating a step-by-step process really is a challenge for business owners as they typically don’t like details. This is where you should have people on your team who think in steps and also like details. You need both the visionary and detail person on your team.
Ultimately, knowing where you want to go doesn’t guarantee that you will get there but it does provide a better roadmap for what is possible and gives you the ability to track your progress along the way.
How do you approach your business processes?
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