One of the main business processes in any organization is the flow of information. The flow of information must be managed so it can be applied appropriately to the right tasks at the right time.
Every business process has a flow, or series of steps, that must be followed in order for it to be successful. A flow can be broken down into a number of steps, called iterations, that must be followed in order to achieve a goal. In order to be successful, a business process must be able to produce a response to an input. The response must be produced in the context of the input, so that the response meets the goal.
It’s important to think about process flows in the context of each individual task that is being performed. If we don’t think about our process flows as part of the overall process, we can be paralyzed by our own process flow. This leads to us doing things that we know are not right.
In certain cases, our business processes can fail, especially if we are not mindful of them. Consider if a customer is unhappy with a service because the order is placed in a wrong way. That is a process failure. However, suppose that we as the service provider are aware of the problem, but we fail to take corrective action. We should always consider this as a potential opportunity in which to improve our process.
Another example of this is an email client you install. You install it, and then it doesn’t work right. Now you don’t want to just send an email to the customer, you also want to send an email to the service provider and say, “Hey, we don’t know this part of the service yet, but we’re going to send you a new version with a few things changed.
If we’re not aware of the problem, we can take corrective actions. Instead of sending an email, however, we can take a look at what’s called a “downtime risk” in your network. It’s not just that the service has been disabled for a while, it’s that you don’t have an actual plan to turn this on and it’s never been going to work.
Let’s talk “downtime” for a second. Think of downtime as the time between when you say the software will be available again and when it actually is. Downtime is when you need to be sure that all the little things have been checked off the list before you can use the updated software.
This is a very real risk that businesses, especially small business that don’t have the funds or the time to do it right, or that don’t have a good team to take care of this sort of thing, run into. When you try to manage multiple processes, you really have to make sure that there isn’t a break in between each one. This means that you need to have an actual process for checking off each of your processes.
The main problem that we have with this is that when it comes to checking off a process, it doesnt really matter if you have a process to check off, because all the others just get done in the same place. This is a problem because it can cause things that shouldnt be checked off to be checked off, and you cant really ensure that you have a process to check off when you dont have one.
Check-off is the process of checking off a process. So when you say, “I’m done,” you’re saying, “What did you do?” If you say “I did nothing,” what you’re really saying is that what I did was very important to me.