Upgrading Old Processes to Meet the Goals of the Future

Problem

My company is a legacy company; it’s been operating for several decades. Many of the people that I am working with come from a different era. Many have never owned a smartphone.

Sometimes, they’ll instruct us to innovate or to create in a way that lacks direction in a practical sense. The innovations in question may not really be in line with the company’s mission statement and other offerings. Meeting their wishes sometimes requires some creative thinking.

A consistent gap in communication between these higher-level managers and the developers building what they were asking for has led to a lot of fruitless effort. We’ve worked out a system that would address this gap between the creative and the technical.

Actions taken

As we are such a mature company, we do a lot of paperwork internally. I’m working on a digital transformation across the group. We are converting everything to a digital format. Some of the people who we work with are slightly resistant to change, which presents its own unique challenge. How can you convert somebody who has been doing things the same way for decades? To change something is to innovate the process.

Even something like buying a domain name can take upwards of two weeks. I’ve made efforts to automate as many of these internal processes as possible, converting physical paperwork into the digital realm. This has increased the pace of our workflow, as well as increased visibility and transparency as each document travels throughout the company.

For more complex challenges, we have instated a digitally-produced framework that goes across the entire company, showing each team what projects of every category looks like from end-to-end. Now, whenever they have questions, they are able to go to whatever phase that they’re stuck in our provided roadmap in order to find the answers that they need. After completing a goal, we administer a questionnaire that shows us where our processes have room to improve.

Lessons learned

• Bringing our company’s workflow into the present digital age has optimized many of the channels that we rely on to do our work with one another.
• Insights that have come out of automating our paper trail also include knowing where bottlenecks in our organization tend to happen. We are able to administer the appropriate training and to improve the structure of the organization where applicable with the help of this information.
• As a company, we wish to grow and to disrupt several verticals in the coming years. Moving with the tides of change and evolving how the company operates will all serve this goal.