Standards + Key Processes + Checklists = Best Practices

“Rip it out. It’s not right.”  "Yeah, but the customer likes it.”  “I can see that it’s wrong. Rip it out. Let’s do it right this time.”   A few things are going on in this interaction. The owner sees that his worker just completed substandard work. The customer didn’t realize the quality problem, but the owner, an expert in the field, quickly sees that it’s “not right.” The owner has high integrity and orders rework even though the customer didn’t complain. The owner won’t allow his company to put out bad quality work, period. The worker is now getting an important lesson on job quality, company standards and owner integrity. I’ve seen it happen both ways: the high integrity rework and the low integrity cover up. You’ve traveled the high integrity path that led you to earn Diamond Certified (if you qualify). As managers, we try to avoid painful rework in the first place. We must consistently produce quality work to build our companies for the long term. Last month, I wrote about the “Deliver Your Promises” section of the Quality Customers Framework. Before the job starts, Step 1 is revisiting customer expectations with a goal of uncovering needs that weren’t well articulated and forcing success by addressing them. Now we dive into the next step: how to effectively do actual work. Do the Job Using Best Practices, Key Processes + Checklists How do you get your team to take the right actions—those that produce great work? It starts with best practices, which can be defined as a standard or set of guidelines that’s known to produce good outcomes if followed. The “if followed” is the tricky part. It’s why you need to identify and outline your key processes, a series of actions, and your standards to measure performance against. Then by adding a checklist to each key process, your team can consistently produce high-quality results with fewer errors. Step 1 – Start at the End Result: Create and Update Standards You have key processes that are followed to produce quality work. Standards define the acceptable output of your key processes. Write your standards in simple language and include some type of number so your work output can be measured and compared to the standard. Review all the standards that your company uses either formally or informally. What’s missing? You definitely should add a standard for every work process where you’ve recently seen quality, cost or turn time problems. With a clear standard to measure performance against, you’ll see when changes to a process produce an outcome that meets or beats your standard. For example, our Production Team produces all of our digital and print products, like Diamond Certified Directories and your Custom Brochures. They’ve developed processes to deliver quality print products. Their processes are devised to meet specific standards. For example, when creating Custom Brochures, their turn time standard is five business days from receipt of all ratings and editorial info to creation of a brochure proof for the owner. Their quality standard is zero typos and grammatical errors. To accomplish this, they’ve including an internal proofing sequence within this key process. These standards are written in simple language, measured and monitored. In this way, if we’re not hitting a standard, we know it and work to change the process or do more training to ensure staff is following our process. Step 2 – Create Checklists for the Known Steps to Success All humans are fallible no matter how experienced. Checklists help your team perform process steps properly and in sequence, which is critical for quality outcomes. Checklists work in every type of business. They result in better outcomes. Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, pioneered the use of checklists in hospitals throughout the world after he researched how the Air Force adopted their use by very experience pilots and dramatically reduced accidents. He got similar improvements in hospitals. Checklists help with the known project or problem to solve, not the unknown, where a process needs to adapt to unique conditions. We use checklists in our company as a tool to guide us step by step in key processes. For example, when we move data into our CRM, we go through a 9-step process simply named “Before You Import Data Checklist.” For consistent quality performance, consider adopting the “Deliver Your Promises” formula of: Standards + Key Processes + Checklists= Best Practices