(Cont'd)

This process takes the intellectual capital out of people’s intellects and commits it to paper for posterity. (This will become extremely important as the boomers retire and take with them decades of experience and know-how.)

Gerber suggests putting the model of the Franchise Prototype to work for you. (How the MacDonald's brothers developed a system that worked flawlessly and has been replicated brilliantly and easily around the world.) He says "Imagine that your business is the prototype for 5,000 more just like it, exactly like it. He asserts that this model (the ‘ideal world’ processes) will help provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer. (That’s why we’re here isn’t it? – to serve our customers.)

Once you’ve assessed and documented your results and processes, you must make sure the organization is set up to promote your continued success.

• Encourage and expect employees to bring to the table new ideas that will improve operations.
• Allow and encourage people to work in various areas of the organization so that they gain and share valuable knowledge about how things are done and the interdependencies that exist within the organization.
• Keep the vision, mission and values in front of everyone – all of the time. Make certain that all employees have written goals that are connected to the organizations mission and strategic initiatives.
• Give employees jobs that are critical to mission accomplishment and that provide them with complex and challenging work.
• Make sure your training efforts are geared toward improving performance of critical business issues by examining which processes have the greatest impact on the critical business issues. By closely examining each step of a few critical processes, actual gaps in performance can be identified. Then targeted training efforts can be directed toward those performance gaps.
• Make sure you have a system in place to periodically review your processes to ensure you are continually improving operations. Establish process improvement teams; budget and plan for periodic reviews.
• Measure your improvements and reward employees for the improvements that are made.

While this periodic review is an investment of time and effort, it is likely to provide returns far greater than no review or the launch of change efforts done without an analysis of what the real sources of your problems are.