Hero Image
- Patrick Salo

Improving Your Workflow

When looking to improve your workflow, there's several ways to proceed. It's not always a difficult effort, and often the hardest part is simply taking the first step. There are no right answers and everyone will have what works for them and their particular preferences.

One way of looking for improvements, is to systematically go through your entire workflow, whether it's screen printing t-shirts or running meetings, and note areas that are problematic and that might require improvement. In many circumstances, this is the best way as you can list as well as rank all your areas of improvement, and determine which can be tackled sooner rather than later based upon your time and resource constraints. In this fashion the entire process could be project managed with precision.

One of the alternate approaches is to not do a deep dive into your entire process, but instead target big ticket problems that everyone already knows about. For example maybe your ink mixer has been on the fritz and hand mixing inks is slowing your team down. Or maybe there's a problem booking online conferences as the app is often unavailable thereby making the scheduling of meetings extremely slow and difficult. In these scenarios you don't need to go hunting for dragons as you already know which are the biggest. Alternatively, if you're short on time or resources, tackling the already known issues without looking for new ones, can likely save you time and money along the way.

But the entire process is flexible with the only goal you should be striving for is continuous improvement over time. There's no reason why one couldn't start with their biggest issues, then when time and resources allow, spend the effort to take on a more systematic approach. One good way of looking at this, is whether or not things are better today, than they were a year ago. Many organizations make no effort to improve and therefore are static from year to year, costing their organization substantial money as problems never seem to ever get resolved. And if you've made some progress, albeit even small, you're often way ahead of others. The idea is to get your inertia going and to start making progress, that you can then build upon over time.

There's never a better time to start looking for improvements in your workflow than today. The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be able to reap the rewards. And although improving even a single aspect of your workflow won't be free, it's often a great investment that pays substantial dividends far into the future.

Comment on this post...