The 3 Company Operational Personas

Tools, adoption of processes, and continuous updates / improvements are all part of running a successful operation. What happens when you're missing one or more of these components?

In this video, I share the 3 company operational personas and some of their characteristics. Which operational persona does your company fall in?

Transcription

Hi it's Xavier Chang, Pricinpal of XC Consulting.

Today, we're back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier and today we're talking about the three company operational personas.

Whenever I'm doing client work, I typically come across one of these three personas and it's focused on implementation of tools, adoption of documentation, processes and procedures, and continuous updates made to any documentation as things change within the department, the company or any type of process.

The first is the paperclip and twine, and these are typically owner/operators, it might be a partner. A lot of their subject matter expertise, the way things are being done, it's in their minds or it's in that one owner/operator's mind and the rest of the company relies heavily on the leadership to actually know what needs to be done.

For one, there's no tools on documentation. So setting up processes and procedures or having anything documented that really just doesn't exist.

In terms of adoption of processes and procedures, it's changing. right? There's nothing to adopt. It's really just like what's the flavor of the day or flavor of the week.

And in terms of continuous updates to documentation, that also doesn't exist because none of it is documented. So paperclip and twine, that's the first persona.

The next one is the black box.

And the black box is a little bit different than the paperclip and twine because they've got many tools and many places where things are being documented. So that could be across email, PDF documents, word documents, Google Drive, Dropbox.

The information is spread out and a lot of it is outdated. So they've got an abundance of tools, maybe just too many.

In terms of adoption, because all of that information is spread out, there's really no adoption. It's really hard to figure out, OK, what's the best version? What's the latest version of how to do a particular process or procedure?

And in terms of continuous updates similar to the adoption, things are just being created and they're never being actually updated. So there's just a new documentation coming out maybe every week or every month. So it's going into the black box. Nobody really knows what's in the black box. So that's our second operational persona.

The third is a three legged stool. As you can imagine, there's just a lot of balance here.

The tools are limited, but they're effective. If you're using a digital project management tool, maybe some of that communication is happening within that tool and not necessarily outside of that tool. Think about using the digital project management tool to replace something like email.

Next, there's adoption from the leadership down. There's adoption of the new tool or process. That is critical for change management. If the leadership is not using that tool or documentation, referencing it, quoting it, then it's really hard for the rest of the organization to do that as well.

And the last is continuous updates. So updates being made as things are changing. Not creating a new version of the document, but actually updating it. A critical piece of that is empowering the whole company and the whole team to actually make those updates. It shouldn't be driven off, just the owner/operator, but anyone on the team should be able to make improvements, document and share them with the team.

Those are the three company operational personas that I've come across. Maybe you fit in one of these or hybrid of maybe two of these. I hope you thought this was helpful. If you did, please like this video, subscribe to my channel and I hope to see you for the next one. Thanks so much.