Consultant Responds: What does a business process consultant do?
Do you struggle with revenue falling through the cracks in your business? Do you wish you could train workers faster, keep employees accountable, and maintain continuity when key people leave?
In this week's video, I respond to a blog post about business process consultants. I give my perspective on how they can help provide an outside perspective on your business.
Resources
https://trainual.com/manual/what-is-a-business-process-consultant-and-how-to-tell-if-you-need-one
Transcription
Hi, it's Xavier Chang, Principal of XC Consulting. Today, we're back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier and today, we are responding to an article by Trainual. Now Trainual is a tool that helps small business owners with documenting their processes and essentially making a training manual from their best practices. So they wrote an article about a year ago about what is a business process consultant, and how to tell if you need one.
So I'm going to scroll down and there was an interesting section that I would like respond to. So there's four steps that they've identified that a business process consultant essentially goes through and does. So step one is they learn how your business operates. Key bullet points here are finding out who is responsible for what, how each task gets carried out, where big decisions are made, and what I'll say here is that is absolutely correct. That's how I approach my work. Really trying to understand the current state of how the business is operating. Current state. So without thinking about improving processes, making things more efficient, I'm really trying to understand who are the key players in the business, in the process, either if that's accounting, that's the sales team, who are those key people? So responsibility and I've also made a video and I'm going to link to it in the top right hand corner calling out the responsibility matrix. The responsibility matrix essentially for every process identifies who the different parties are that are involved.
So for the second one, second bullet point, how each task gets carried out, and this is really just listening and understanding what is going on in this process, and what I find oftentimes is when I'm talking to department leaders, managers, analysts, administrators, they'll tell me this is how it should be done but this is really how we are doing it. So I try to find a middle ground to figure out, "Okay, what is actually the current state? Are we going to say the version of how it should be done or what's currently being done," and I like to go with the latter of let's just put down what we're currently doing. Let's not dress it up. Let's just really understand what's going on today. Even if that's not the most optimal way, or the way that the leadership or the CEO wants things to be done.
And then the last one is related to where big decisions are made, and this goes back to the point of how the task gets carried out. So learning how the business operates, I think that's absolutely correct. I do that with video calls, I get corresponding documentation. It's very tedious work. I have to get inside the minds of my clients and understand what they do on a day to day level.
Okay, step two. Look for inefficiencies and inconsistencies. So they say, they go on to say here in this first paragraph, when you're inside the company, doing the work, you're often to close to the problems and opportunities to see them. I think this is absolutely true. When I'm talking with my clients, they are so knee-deep into the work, they don't even see that they're doing things a different way for each project or that there's inconsistencies across the board. As a business process consultant, what I do is I take that 30,000 foot view, then I zoom in and then I zoom out, and I help to illustrate, "Okay, here are some of those inefficiencies. Here are some of those inconsistencies. What do you want to do with that? Are we going to make sure we've got consistency across the board? Is it okay that there's inconsistency?" It's really just shining a light on that.
And business process consultant, like they say here in the article, is that fresh pair of eyes, and in another section of the article, they go on to mention that it's not important or imperative that you have a consultant that has exact industry experience, industry that they're serving, right? So if it's related to construction or legal or consulting, that doesn't really matter. I think it's really about coming in with a fresh pair of eyes, having a pretty good business sense, and calling it like it is. I think that's really important.
Okay, moving on. Step three, optimize your processes and systems. I never go in selling this. This is really just a byproduct of what I do. It's really important to get the first two steps down. So get that current state, understand what is inefficient, can be done in a normalized and a consistent manner. Step three, this is icing on the cake, optimizing processes and systems. This is what executives and leaders really get excited about but without me understanding your business, I can't do that. So this is really something that's a little bit extra.
All right, so step four, build consistent, easy to follow SOPs. Yes, this is absolutely true, and I think this goes back to the inconsistency. This is creating a consistent way to share information. It comes down to the look and feel of how a document looks, how it's structured. When somebody's new to the company and they come in and they open up that manual, either if that's analog in a book, in a notebook, or if that's digital in a tool like Trainual or Asana or Teamwork, it needs to be consistent and easy to follow. And I'll note here with the easy to follow is avoid using any crazy jargon that you will need to know if you're part of the industry. I think that's a big learning curve for whoever's coming into the company or who's new to the industry. So try to stay away from that industry jargon. I also try to write in plain language. I think that's important that it's not too highfalutin and too complicated for people to understand. It really needs to be digestible. So writing in plain language, and writing for my audience so they're not just reading a bunch of acronyms. And that is really what makes the documentation in addition to the user experience easy to follow and having that consistency.
One thing I'll add to this, because we crossed over, we passed over the steps, is that these SaaS-based companies, a lot of them, they've got their software, but they also have consultants that help you to implement these tools. It's not that the tool is super complicated, but this skillset takes someone from the outside. Someone who has the bandwidth, the time to really zoom out of the company. So either if you go with Trainual, you go with Asana, you go with Process Street, there's going to be consultants that work with the company, that can work with your company, to help you create this documentation, create these SOPs. And it might not be a bad move to do that, right? Creating this on your own is very difficult. Especially if you're stuck in the day to day and you really can't see 10 feet in front of you. You need someone that's going to be able to zoom out.
So those are just some of my thoughts about business process consultants and kind of the approach they take whenever they're looking at companies, looking at different processes, and if you can recreate this yourself, that might be a good solution. You could also go to your SaaS-based companies and oftentimes they'll have a bench or they'll have an agency, freelancers that could work with you. So check that out. Appreciate you checking out my video. I will see you next time.
Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel with Xavier. I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content. Thanks again and I hope to see you again next time.