In this age of 24/7 Client focus, it is easy for Practice Management to lose sight of the fundamentally important job of looking for internal systematic operating process bottlenecks.
In many cases hidden away in the business, there are functions that remain supported primarily by a mixture of seemingly permanent ‘temporary Shadow Systems" such as spreadsheets and shared drives, all supported by manually driven processes.
Quite often, due to budget prioritisation, resource focus or simply not allocating "your own business review time", opportunities to introduce robust, low risk digital solutions to help improve productivity and bottom-line profitability are missed.
Typical questions that need to be asked include:
- Can we ensure our compliance and governance processes are adhered to?
- Are our data sources secure and controlled?
- Are we maximising the value of our data?
- Do our processes work seamlessly across the Practice and externally to our Clients?
- Can we guarantee that GDPR request can be answered?
- Am I sure that my KPI's are based upon fact?
- How can we work smarter?
Many organisations do not have accurate accounting of their own IT estate. How many and what types of servers? How many and what types of applications? How well utilised is the IT estate? Are there redundancies in application licenses and maintenance? How much of the estate is at the end of service life (EOSL)? Can the estate be consolidated based on newer infrastructure?
Regular analysis of the costs and performance of your legacy applications identifies the gaps, performance degradation, outages and service interruptions that inevitably arise. The resulting analytics highlight areas that need to be modernised to improve the performance, availability, and support of your systems.
Importantly, the benefits of process optimisation have a wider reach than just the business processes. The operational knowledge and experience needed to manage and oversee people dependent process tends to be concentrated in the heads of a few key individuals. This resulting in greater risk to the business.
Ironically, fewer people with complete knowledge of key processes, also complicates succession planning, making transitions prone to disruptions, relationships with partners strained and general discontent within the organisation.
Ultimately, a more structured, stress free working environment that enables your teams to function effectively, enhances well-being and can contributed to staff retention, will enhance productivity, increase customer satisfaction and contribute to greater profitability.
