How To Systemise Your Business As If You Were Managing A Project

Systemising your business can seem like an overwhelming and mammoth task, and this is probably one of the key reasons why so many serviced-based business small business owners never really create all the systems they should. It's a daunting prospect, but there is a way to make it more manageable so that you can get results and start to see your systems working in your business.

The trick is to treat systemising your business just like you would any other project. This means, having a date for when you will start your systemising project, and a date when you can say that you are happy with everything you have created and you are happy to call the project complete. It's really important to set these two dates up front for two reasons.

First, setting the timeframe for your systems development will give you the parameters around which to set your goals for system development. If you don't know when you've actually started, or when you'll finish, it's much harder to set priorities and goals, and therefore your ability to achieve the end goal of the project - to systemise your business, greatly diminishes.

Secondly, timeframes allow you to establish milestones. That is, those tangible achievements the make you feel like screaming "Yes, I'm getting somewhere", or "Yes, I'm making progress!" Setting a milestone could be as simple as saying at the halfway point of my project, I want to have documented 5 systems, and this is your tangible progress - your proof that you are on your way to completing your systemising project.

When I'm managing my systems projects, I like to set milestones at a quarter of the way, halfway and three quarters. These are like my guideposts. If I'm not reaching my milestone, or at least very close, I know that my ability to complete my project by the date I set, will be almost impossible.

Once you've set your start and end dates, you need to set the "scope" for your systemising project. The scope is simply what your project will include and what it will exclude. For example you might set up a systemising project to document all of your "client facing processes", and anything that is not related to servicing existing clients is not included in this systemising project.

Systemising your business doesn't have to be one big project. Break it down into "mini projects". That's what setting your scope at the beginning of your project will do. It will help you to set the scene for exactly what you will systemise and what you won't be systemising as part of your project.

After you have worked out your start date, end date, your milestones and your scope for your systemising project, commit it to paper. This then forms the "framework" for your project. The next step is to look at the scope of your project, and write down which process you will document. Then, work out which ones you will commit to completing for each of your milestones. Once you have this on paper, print it out and stick it on the wall above your computer as a visual reminder of your commitment to systemising your business.

Comments? Questions? Email Here

© HowtoAdvice.com