Optimize For Outcomes - The Podcast

Hey everyone! This is a quick update on the last couple of months and an update on plans for future episodes.

In this episode, I cover a system that you can use in your business for interviewing prospective employees or contractors.
 
I cover how to prepare for the interview including identifying the must haves and nice to haves.
 
I talk through organizing questions and how to structure questions to get more meaningful answers.
 
I give a few examples from actual interviews that I did.
 
This one is about twice as long as usual, but I didn't want to leave anything out or split it in half.

The written version of this...

Hiring the right resources in your business is one of the most important activities you can do.
 
 Do it right and you'll be able to achieve more than you could ever imagine.
 
 Do it wrong and your team or business will stagnate at best.
 
 In this episode, I cover the key steps in getting the people resources you need including long-term employees, contractors, freelancers, and vendors.
 
 Here's a link to a related resource mentioned in this video - a course on how to perform a time study - https://resources.optimizeforoutcomes.com/prod...

One of the most important things you do as a leader is to identify and bring people resources into your business.
 
This week is an introduction to People Lifecycle Management.
 
I introduce the four phases of managing people in your business and lay the foundation for deep dives into each of the phases in the coming four weeks.

Learning how to hire, rewire, inspire, and retire people is critical to growing and scaling your business beyond the solo entrepreneur phase.

Change Management is an important part of any optimization work that you do in your business.
 
People have a tendency to revert to old habits. Even when a change is beneficial, people can slide back to doing things "the old way."
 
Change management helps you proactively address this concern and helps you ensure that any changes you make will become new habits that last.

If you want to get more efficient and/or grow your business or team, learning how to automate business processes is critical to reaching that outcome.
 
I will sequence how you can approach automating business processes and give you some pointers on things to do and things to avoid.
 
Having this lightweight framework will give you a mental model for thinking through the core steps to automating a business process in an effective and efficient manner.

If you want to improve business processes, a simple mental model can help you with your approach.

Eliminate, Consolidate, Automate
 
Eliminate the things you're doing that aren't helping you achieve your desired outcomes or adding value to the Customer.
 
Consolidate like "things" in your business into a single process to manage them.
 
Automate your business processes, removing manual work and giving your business scale that it otherwise couldn't get.

A SIPOC is a process improvement tool that you can use to map a business process.
 
SIPOC is an acronym that stands for Supplier, Input, Process Step, Output, Customer. Use it to map these attributes of a business system.
 
You can then use this information to identify changes to make to improve your system.
 
I've added some additional elements to the SIPOC to increase its usability and value in process improvement work.

You can better manage your employees using swimlane diagrams. A swimlane diagram is going to help you understand the dynamics between different roles in your business or team and help you identify potential problems or conflicts.

You're also going to gain perspective on the work the team is actually doing which you can use for goal setting and career planning.

Visit People Management - Optimize For Outcomes to learn how I can help you better manage employees in your company.

Use a swimlane diagram to document your processes. Draw lanes left to right for each person or tech in a process and then draw out each step in the process and put it in the swimlane for the person or tech responsible for that tech.
 
This will help you see and understand where handoffs are happening in your process as well as rework and process loops.
 
All of these are big areas of inefficiency that you can then address with systems thinking and process improvement tools which will help you scale with less waste.

Here are four different applications you can use to draw swimlane diagrams.
 
Each has its own benefits, so weigh what's right for you and your business and make a decision.
 
MS Visio - very powerful and tightly integrated with Microsoft's other productivity apps. It's not part of Office though and requires additional licenses which might be cost-prohibitive.
 
Google Drawings - Google's free drawing application which has many of the features of MS Visio and all of Google's pros/cons for their productivity apps.
 
Lucidchart - SaaS-based drawing application that has lots of u...

A swimlane diagram is a tool that you can use to get a detailed view of a process in your business.
 
It's used when you need a deeper understanding of a process than a process narrative can provide.
 
It's useful when trying to get more efficient with your process or as training documentation for new employees.
 
Oftentimes, just by creating a swimlane diagram of a process, you'll see 2-3 things you can do immediately to make the process better.

This podcast references a diagram that can be seen on the Optimize For...

If you manage employees in your business, add root cause analysis to the way you think
 
Doing root cause analysis can help you better understand performance issues and solve any problem you're facing while managing people.
 
You'll understand the problems on a deeper level and come up with better solutions, saving you time, energy, and money in the long run.

How can root cause analysis help your business grow?
 
Growing a business, you need to get effectiveness and efficiency right first.
 
To do that, you have to solve problems that are preventing effectiveness and efficiency.
 
Use the 5 whys to get to root causes of problems and solve the problems that really matter.

Using technology can help you do root cause analysis in your business.
 
Keep in mind that a root cause analysis is more about thinking, so the best tools are things you can use to give reminders to ask follow-up questions.

Root Cause Analysis is a way of thinking to help you look beyond surface level symptoms and solve problems at a deeper level.
 
This will save you time, energy, and money which will make it easier for you to grow your business and build for the long term.
 
You'll solve the right problems faster and with better solutions than if you treat surface-level symptoms that are causing your business issues.
 
While there are many tools to help you do this, I focus primarily on understanding the five whys as a mental model for doi...

Understanding the difference between effectiveness and efficiency is critical for improving your business.
 
If you don't do this, you won't know how to fix the problems that are preventing your growth and preventing you from achieving your desired outcomes.

If you want to grow your business successfully, you need to work on your effectiveness and efficiency before trying to scale.

Businesses that don't do this will run into problems quickly, and those problems will be major roadblocks to any growth.

Using technology to survey Customers is a great way to understand the effectiveness of your products.
 
 For internal business systems, most software has built-in metrics that will give you an understanding of the effectiveness of the system using the software.

 | Effectiveness and Efficiency are often misunderstood. In business, knowing the difference can be the difference between your business growing or remaining stagnant.

I talk through examples of scaling, using technology to better understand your effectiveness and efficiency, and how to think about the effectiveness and efficiency of how your business hires employees.

Thanks for listening! Any questions or feedback can be sent to me at brian@optimizeforoutcomes.com

No matter where your business is at today, taking the time to do a time study can help you better understand where your time is going and what you can do to get more efficient with your work.
 
Whether your business is brand new or has been around for years, take a week to track your time, get a better understanding of where your time is going, and make adjustments to refocus on what's going to give you the outcomes you want.

A time study will help you understand the work that needs to get done in your business on a deeper level.

Understanding this will help you hire the right people and will help you distribute the work amongst your employees.

In this episode, Brian dives deep into an example of using the data that comes from a time study to make better hiring decisions.

 A time study will help you understand the work that needs to get done in your business on a deeper level.

You'll see how much time your business is spending on different activities during the week. This will give you an understanding of the skill sets that you need in your business as well as the amount of time a new hire would stay busy.
 
Understanding this will help you hire the right people and will help you distribute the work amongst your employees.
 

Excel or Google Sheets are great tools to use to track a time study. There's a template on the Optimize For Outcomes resource site or you can make your own.
 
You only need a few columns in your spreadsheet. Track the person doing the work (if you have more employees in your business), the system that the work pertains to, a label for the work being done (e.g. "Research Content" or "Write Blog Article" or "Pack Orders"), and the time spent on the work.

Performing a time study will help you understand and eliminate wasted hours in your business.
 
By reducing waste, that means you're making your business more efficient.
 
When you go to scale your business, you'll need less work to get bigger because you've eliminated waste that would have otherwise scaled along with the revenue.

Visit What is a Time Study and How Can it Help Your Business? - Optimize For Outcomes to read more or listen to the longer podcast from the beginning of this week.

A time study is a tool that you can use to help make your business more efficient and more effective.
 
It's one of the most common tools that Brian uses with Clients looking to scale their business or get more time back in their day.
 
Follow along while Brian covers some of the benefits of a time study and how to do your own for your business.

If you're just getting started with continuous improvement, here's a step-by-step guide on how to approach it.

First, define the major systems in your business. What are the things you do to make your business work?

Now, identify which one is giving you the most trouble. This could be taking too much time, costing too much money, isn't giving you the outcomes you want, etc.

Identify one to three things you could change that you will try over the next month. At the end of the month, see how you improved. Keep doing...

A mindset of continuous improvement means you are regularly looking at what you're doing and trying to make improvements.

One mental model that will help you do this is the "Five Whys."

Anytime you are confronted with a problem you're trying to solve and you ask yourself, "why is this happening?" don't just stop there. Continue asking "why" until you get to a root cause.

Five is just an example and not a magic number. Sometimes you need to ask three times and others seven. Keep going until you get answers that don't...

If you're hiring or thinking of hiring, you can use continuous Improvement to help you do that.

Continuous Improvement is going to help you understand the work that's happening on a deeper level and the documentation you create when continuously improving your business will help you identify who to hire and how much work you have for them to do. 

It will also serve as training materials when you bring the person on board.

Continuous Improvement requires continuous tracking of performance.

An easy way to do that is to use Excel or Google Sheets to track some basic stats on your systems each week or month.

Another tool you can use is a project management application like Asana or Basecamp. Use this to manage the different tasks you want to do to improve your business and prioritize the work needed for improvements.

Continuous Improvement will make everything you do more efficient. As your business gains efficiency, that makes it easier to scale.

When you scale your business, you scale the bad along with the good. If your business is full of inefficiency, that will scale along with the positives, leading to more wasted time, energy, and dollars.

By improving what it is you're doing, you will reduce the inefficiency in your systems and business. When you scale, you'll scale with fewer problems and time sinks.

Continuous Improvement is a mindset that can help all aspects of your business.

Use it to improve the efficiency of your systems which will make it easier to scale your business.

Improve the way you deploy technology, saving you time and money.

Better hire and manage employees, giving them a better experience.

Solve problems in an effective and efficient manner.

A written version of this appears at https://www.optimizeforoutcomes.com/what-is-continuous-improvement/.

You can break a system down into its parts and then align those parts to the desired outcomes of the system.

Make sure the inputs, process steps, and outputs are needed to achieve the desired outcomes of the system. If anything is out of alignment, make the adjustments needed to get your system aligned. 

The desired outcomes of each system should help you reach the desired Ultimate Outcomes of your business.

Make sure you're adequately covering your desired Ultimate Outcomes with the systems in your business. If you have a gap, identify it and fix it as appropriate.

At some point, you have to change what you're doing if you want to get better outcomes. The methodological approach to this is to look at the parts of an individual system. The parts of the system that give you the outcomes that you're getting are inputs, process steps, and outputs.
 
Learn about breaking down the pieces of a system and the questions you want to ask yourself to start Optimizing for Outcomes.

Identify system conflicts and gaps to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of systems in your business.

To better align the activities within your business, break the things you do down into systems and relate each system to your desired Ultimate Outcomes (why are you in business?).

 Each system should have its own desired outcome (why do you want the outputs of this system in your business?)

If you want to get more efficient and quit wasting time and money, start aligning what you're doing in your business. The first step is to define your desired Ultimate Outcomes. 

Answer the question "Why are you in business? What is it you are ultimately trying to achieve?"

One of the biggest sources of waste in a business comes from misalignment of the things a business is doing to the desired outcomes of the business.
 
 Systems Thinking can help you see and fix that misalignment to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business. This will save you time and money while allowing you to scale more easily.

If you need to improve anything in your business, you can use systems thinking to do it.

Systems thinking is all about seeing your business in systems which then allows you to apply mental models and tools to make improvements to the system.

Because systems have the same attributes, these tools work on any system in your business, no matter what the system is trying to do.