Processes: There are Levels to this Game

Imagine you are hired as the Head Chef of a new restaurant.

One of your first orders of business is to create a tasty menu made from your best recipes.

The best chefs (as well as the best surgeons, pilots, train conductors, etc) operate from step-by-step recipes or checklists.

But, it’s been proven that even the most experienced chef, pilot, or surgeon will forget steps if they are not using an actual checklist.

For a chef, a good recipe can make or break a restaurant:

Is it tasty?

Replicateable?

Produced at high enough margin to contribute to a profitable restaurant?

Imagine the opposite:

Not Tasty - bad reviews will result and the hungry crowd will go elsewhere.

Not Replicateable - quality will vary, it will be difficult to train other chefs, and the number of diners will depend on the max output of the Head Chef who becomes a bottleneck in the process.

Not Margin Producing - the restaurant will go bankrupt without profit to sustain it even with exquisitely delicious food.

In your team or businesses, your processes are your recipes.

For you, are your processes:

…tasty? ie. Is the process producing the high quality result you want to be known for?

…replicateable? ie. Is it easy to train a new person to execute the process?

…margin producing? ie. Is your labour and/or material cost in line with the profit margin you require for this process to create a profitable business?

Just like being a chef has levels, I see processes in companies at different levels as well:

Beginner:

• Too many processes are not documented. They are being executed from people’s heads because it’s faster. Training new people is difficult and there are sometimes quality issues even with experienced people who skip over or miss steps in their haste.
• “Chef de partie” - when creating a new dish, write down the step-by-step process and store it in a searchable recipe database for easy retrieval. Give you recipe to another Junior Chef and see if the result is the same and the directions are clear.

Intermediate:

• Processes are documented and centralized but never updated, clarified, improved, or reduced/removed if unnecessary.
• “Sous Chef” - recipes are updated when new, better or cheaper ingredients are discovered. Unclear steps are updated with better, more expressive and clear language. Old, outdated, or unnecessary steps are removed entirely. The chef looks for things that can be done simultaneously instead of linearly to save time. For example, can the eggs be cooked at the same time as the bacon instead of one after the other? There is continual improvement and documentation.

Advanced:

• Process steps are documented and continuously updated but missing automation especially the slowest, most tedious steps. The throughput time of the process is longer than it needs to be. The process is missing automation to reduce time while preserving quality.
• “Executive Chef” - the Chef finds ways to save and free up their (and the the team’s) time for higher value activities. Could machines be used to slice carrots instead of by hand? Could mixing machines be used instead of mixing by hand? Could certain completed parts of the recipe arrive ‘just in time’ from other food suppliers? Could certain ingredients be re-stocked automatically when stores are low so they never run out?

What level of process is your team at and how can you get to the next level?