RG+A

Headquarters P : 267-744-6400 |
ContactsRoger Green Ellen Gordon |
On the Webwww.thinkrga.com |
Blog: Balancing Process and Red Tape in a Small Professional Services Company by Tim Phelan | |
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Published 10/06/2015 | |
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) aren’t always glamorous, but they can be vitally important to ensuring a healthy and efficient organization. But how do you know when too much process has turned your organization into a bureaucracy, where employees are ignoring independent decision making in favor of blindly adhering to some steps in a training manual? For RG+A, striking the right balance isn’t always easy. We’re a company with smart, creative, and independent employees, and stymieing their creativity and talent with rigid protocols would limit what we consider to be one of our key strengths. Nonetheless, we’ve got to ensure that we make the most of our talents and can scale to meet varying client needs. Putting written SOPs in place is oftentimes the best way to do that. Let’s take a look at a simple but important task that business-to-business companies of all sizes must undertake – quality control. As a risk mitigation practice arising from a spike in project load over the summer and the on-boarding of several new employees, we recently updated our SOP for quality control on research deliverables. For RG+A, an SOP around quality control is important as it speaks to our commitment to top-notch proposals, reports, and other out-bound deliverables. No matter how smart, insightful, or strategic our work is, we can’t maintain credibility with our clients if we aren’t tight on research execution. A small team worked on the SOP, including stakeholders from operations and research, and the net output was a brief document built around four key areas – communications, timing, feedback, and proofing. Due to the brevity of the SOP document, we elected to e-mail it to the entire organization, and specific follow-ups were made with individual personnel and at team meetings. Since pushing the SOP out, we’ve seen an increase in the quality of our outputs as new and old employees are taking accountability for quality control and integrating the process seamlessly into their day-to-day work habits. Drawing on the above and other SOP experiences, here are a few tips that I’ve found can ensure that your SOPs are impactful:
What tips do you have for making your SOPs impactful? How much process is too much process? How do you achieve balance? Visit this post on LinkedIn and become part of the dialogue. Read on the Blog |