How to reduce risk when rolling out a new system

When you’re rolling out a new system or process in your business, there’s always a bit of risk involved.

What if something falls through the cracks?

What if your new system breaks another process down the line?

It can mean missed payments, pissed off customers, and confused staff...

The thing is, as your business grows, the level of sophistication needed to run it grows too.

Any business doing over $5k a month needs a variety of back-end systems. Systems that do some of the work so you don’t have to. Think accounts payable, client on-boarding, and so on.

And your business can’t stop in its tracks every time you want to roll something new out.

But even if you test your new process to an inch of its life… there’s still some room for an unforeseen error to pop up when you’re executing it.

Perhaps you’ve had this happen in your business!

Often I see business owners rolling out a new process, checking it maybe once or twice, and leaving it at that. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in hope that things will work perfectly, because I know that they most often don’t!

So at The Game Changers, when we roll out a new process, the job isn’t done when we go live. We also spend time on -

✔Applying and testing

✔Noticing where the shortfalls are

✔Filling the gap

Now, I certainly don’t go out looking for trouble, but I do believe the best teacher is adversity.

It’s when things don’t go right that we learn the biggest lessons.

Which is why when things go wrong with our systems or processes at The Game Changers, we have a process for that, too 🙂

Some of the questions we ask are:

1. Was the process followed? If your system wasn’t followed, you know the issue is with your staff. Do they need more training? Are they the wrong fit for the role?
2. If the process was followed, where there is a step missing or unclear that has allowed this problem to occur?

There’s a theory within Neuro Linguistic Programming that whatever you’re achieving in life right now is a successful result of what you’ve done to get there.

If you’re experiencing the same problem in business on repeat, it’s because of the strategy you’re running to create that situation…

The issue is not the result.

The issue is the strategy that’s being run again and again that’s producing the result.

The result is simply the logical conclusion of the steps within the preceding strategy.

System or process failure in your business will happen.

Especially if you're a believer in implementation over perfection (and I hope you are!)

Your systems are always live.

You can’t fully test them in a vacuum.

So when you’re rolling stuff out in a live environment, have processes for mitigating your risk.

Here’s a few ideas:

• Schedule a reminder every 6 months to review and update the process. Is there a better way to do it?
• Build a feedback loop into each of your systems so that a staff member is checking that nothing (and nobody) is falling through the cracks.
• Assign a KPI to each part of the process, and make the person accountable for that part of the process also accountable for hitting that KPI every single time.

Remember there is no point in having a system just for its own sake. Every system in your business needs to have a measurable result. It needs to earn its keep.

And having measurable KPIs for each system is the best way to keep your finger on the thermostat of how the system is performing.

It’s the only way to keep getting feedback on its efficiency, instead of waiting until the wheels have fallen off and it’s too late to do anything about it!