How do you go from documenting your core systems to becoming fully systemised?
Once your core systems are systemised, and you start building momentum and a systems-thinking culture within your team, deciding on the next set of systems can sometimes be a challenge.
Why? Because you want to be optimised, you want to see the reward for effort and time spent. So naturally, you want to know that the systems you create will be effective.
So how do you know that you’re creating the most effective systems?
The answer is to have an overview of the systems you need to create. By creating a roadmap of all of the systems your business needs, you’ll see what needs to be done next. Then it’s just a matter of picking off those systems one by one.
How do you identify those systems?
Start by listing out all of your departments and then the weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual tasks. Then list the trigger tasks; these are the events that trigger a particular process that needs to be followed. For example, an inbound call, an order, or onboarding/offboarding of an employee.
The trick is to capture all of those repeating functions in your business that, when mapped out, give you an overview of what your systemised business will look like.
Check out the video on how to create a roadmap of your fully systemised business.
Timestamps:
0:11 – Another way to think about how to systemise your business.
0:31 – Think about your business in terms of departments.
0:47 – When are certain systems, processes or SOPs actually initiated?
1:39 – The different types of business systems that are initiated
2:19 – Start off with one department
2:52 – Seeing what sort of tasks happen, and when.
3:15 – The holy grail of business systems
3:34 – How to set delegate recurring tasks using PM software
3:59 – Learn more, grab yourself a copy of SYSTEMology
Transcription:
Hey, it’s David Jenyns, founder of SYSTEMology. And in this video, I just wanted to give you another way to think about your business as you start to build a systems culture. And I want you to be able to really clearly identify what are the systems that you need to document.
So oftentimes, this is the way that I’ll explain business. And as you’re starting on this system’s documentation journey, what it is that you’re looking to build out and what finished looks like. So if we think about your business in terms of the different departments, we’ve got marketing, sales, operations, finance, HR. There might be management, you might have other departments. But that’s a nice little starting point for you to think about your business in terms of the departments. Then down the left hand side here, what I’ve written is when are certain systems processes or SOPs actually initiated? Sometimes some of them are triggered based on a particular action. There’s an action, and then that causes the reaction of that system to be followed.
So, for example, if you have a phone call coming into your business, there might be a system for the way that that phone call is answered. Now, that system is only followed when the phone call comes in, but it’s not happening on any particular set interval. That phone call just comes in when it’s going to come in, and then you follow the process. So that’s what I call a triggered system. But then we’ve got other systems that are weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. These are the systems that fall due or need to happen on a certain cadence.
So you might be preparing a particular report once a week or maybe in the Finance Department. And let’s actually Mark some of these in so you get a real clear visual of what I’m talking about. So let’s say once a month, your finance Department creates a PNL, and we talked about a phone call coming in, and that system might happen and is triggered when that phone call comes in. Maybe HR, you have an annual review. So you think about each of the different departments, and you might start off with marketing here. And we think there might be certain triggers or events that trigger a particular system or a process to be followed.
So, for example, if we get a book order for one of our SYSTEMology books that then triggers the system. But then there might be some other weekly, monthly, or quarterly tasks. So weekly tasks, we might have a particular content creation system, monthly tasks. There might be reporting around how a particular channel is done. And then annually we might have a particular meeting that we run in marketing to help plan out the next year.
But you can do that same line of thinking in each of these different departments, and you can start to get a little bit of a grid here on what sort of tasks happened when now anytime that is either a triggered weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, I’m going to suggest that you have a system or a process that backs up that particular task.
The Holy grail is to actually turn all of these green where all of those repeating functions that you know that happen in your business have a system process. Sop whatever you want to call it, just sitting behind them. So that way it makes it easier to start to delegate because then we can start to think about how we can shift this into your project management platform, how we can then set up these recurring tasks with appropriate documentation when the task is assigned to an individual. And now we’re talking about really creating some clear accountability.
So again just a way to think about your business. I think you’re going to find it really helpful. It will probably build a little bit on what you know if you’ve read a copy of the SYSTEMology book. So definitely check that out if you haven’t and hopefully that starts you on your journey. I’ll catch you in the next video.
