The Streamlined Business Blog is all about getting—and keeping—Operations Under Control by implementing good business systems, processes, and standard operating procedures. Our staff experts blog regularly on a range of topics including: Operations Mapping approaches, systems-based management, standardizing operations, calculating costs and ROI for systems improvements and a whole lot more.
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The Propagation of “Busy” is Dangerous Trend
“Do you rush through the morning paper, barely skimming the headlines while answering emails and making kids’ lunches? Do you compete with coworkers over how late you stay at the office each night?” Lisa Evan’s recent piece in Fast Company provides a brief overview of the culture of busy. It is a topic that is […] READ MORE
Share Your SOPS How You Need To, When You Need To
One of the key elements to making policies and standard operating procedures actually useful is to share your SOPs with your employees. While this sounds obvious, a lot of organizations create old-fashioned SOP documents and employee handbooks only to store them in a binder somewhere that lives in a file drawer with the extra pens […] READ MORE
5 Ways to Finally Get Your Procedure Manuals Done
We’re amazed at the number of people who really want to develop better standard operating procedures for their organization, who clearly understand the benefits of standardized procedures and who even have management mandates and funded projects to develop or update their policies and procedure manuals. But–despite all that–never manage to actually do anything about it. […] READ MORE
Think you know the difference between Policy and Procedure? Test your knowledge!
When writing policies and procedures, it is critical to understand which content is Policy and which content is Procedure to ensure usability and ongoing maintenance and tracking. Many of our customers have told us they know regulators and auditors hate to see Policy mixed with Procedure in company procedures manuals and corporate training material, but […] READ MORE
It’s Never the Employee. It’s Your System
We ran across this very interesting post on a NY Times small businesss blog called It’s Never the Employee and thought we’d share. Here are some key points: “To those who complained that employees were coming to them with simple problems to be solved, had the employees been given training on options to solve those kinds of problems? No.” […] READ MORE
Are Your “Core Systems” and “Key Processes” a Joke?
We had to laugh out loud at the June 3rd “Dilbert” comic strip. As usual, Scott Adams put his finger on how often strategic management processes like “core systems”– that sound so good in the board room–can misfire and become punchlines around the water cooler. Are you actually encouraging your employees and colleagues to act […] READ MORE
