Planning to Improve – The Continuous Improvement Process
6:30PM Jan 31, +0000
Speakers:
Nathan Ingram
Beth Livingston
Keywords:
project
process
project manager
document
learned
lessons
continuous improvement
nathan
project management
beth
wp
question
client
academy
business
improvement
chat
sops
folks
agency
Did you know I thought that separating things out into a subdomain would would be great, but I'm not so sure that was the best decision because now I have to remember does this reside on the main site or does it reside on the subdomain every time somebody asked me for a link?
Well, you know, if you have a standard operating procedure about these things, then
yeah, I know the cobblers children have no shoes. We know that.
Indeed, indeed. Okay. Oh, wow. So Elizabeth needs a babysitter for 20 Horses anybody this weekend so she can come to work camp Birmingham. I've lost the chair. Where's the chair? Oh, it's over here. So welcome, everybody. We're about two and a half minutes away from getting started with that continuous improvement planning to improve with Beth Livingston of the WP project managers Academy.
We're gonna get started just in a moment. Here. If you are just joining us in the chat, let me share with you once again, the slides for today and all of the links
you should also be seeing the transcript if you would like to have captions and transcript that's all up and going. Just about two minutes out now. Hey, Stacy. Glad you're all here. We got a lot to learn today. A lot to improve. Good grief. We can only use improvement in this one. I think I certainly can. Yeah, Stacy, we had you you are going to come to last year's right the ill fated 2022 word camp Birmingham that had to get cancelled. terrible terrible.
But we will be well represented from the I iThemes Training things. Let's see Paul Talbot is going to be there. Super lynskey is going to be there. Beth Livingston is going to be there. Who else? Melanie ad COC is going to be there. Yeah, yeah. Let's take a group photo and post it be great. Yeah, folks, we're one minute out one minute from starting. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat, say hello. Grab today's slides. The link is there waiting on you. We're talking all about improving your checklist and standard operating procedures. That came from Sweden Good to see the captions and transcripts should be working for those of you that want to follow along there. We're just about ready to get started. Amelia from Sri Lanka, welcome. Hey, Ben. Sweden. Good to see everybody popping in here. Hey, Sadie, Sadie. I didn't know you were in Scotland. That is on my wife's bucket list is to go to Scotland.
up in the morning to Yeah. That's Ireland. Oh, sorry.
The different country altogether, Beth?
Yes, I know. I'm very
sorry. Yeah, those of us in the United States. We don't we don't realize there's other countries sometimes it's just
like I always have to go okay, is that British South African Australia and Australia. I've pretty much figured out now but the others are.
So glad you're all here. We have a lot to learn today about continuing improvement. So let me get the recording started and we'll dive right in. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another Live AI iThemes Training event. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here die iThemes Training and I'm joined today by my friend Beth Livingston, who is a project management expert with the VB project managers Academy, the founder of that prestigious institution. In fact, Beth is going to be talking to us today about improving our checklists and standard operating procedures with this webinar. So Ben, how you doing today? I'm great. How
are you? Nathan? Thank you for having me.
I am doing well. I am stressing because this weekend is working in Birmingham. We've been talking about that in the pre show a little bit and I'm on the organizing team and it's the week of word camp is always just absolutely stinking crazy. So I am treading water but I'm ready to learn today. Okay, excellent. Yeah. So what why do we need to know what is so important about keeping standard operating procedures and checklists and keeping those up to date? Why do we need to do that as business owners?
Okay, a repeatable process just makes things easier. And I mean, there's like, it's a no brainer. So it's all about repeatable processes, right? And then, you know, something breaks something a new rule changes, you know, privacy policies is a great example right? changes all the time. So now I got to change how I do things. In fact, Nathan, I remember when, when, when these privacy policy generators first came out, and I mentioned it to you and you said I'll never do that. I'll never do that. And now you're a proponent of it, because we've had to be right. So things change and you have to change your standard operating procedures, you have to change the way that you do things. There is this is actually a continuous improvement is actually its own discipline. Just like project management used to not be and now it is continuous improvements in some discipline. There's people who have degrees and certificates in this stuff, but I'm going to show you the easy way to do this for those of us who are solopreneurs or I've got a little screen overlap there. Sorry. Sorry. So let me
let me jump in ask you another quick question before we turn it over to you and that is what is the WP project managers Academy?
Oh, okay. So this is where you can learn to consistently get your projects completed on time within budget with the right requirements, meeting your client's business requirements without sacrificing profit. There's a lot of us who can do that, but we're working 60 hour weeks and stuff and that's not so you're eating into your own profit. But there are standard processes that we developed back in I say we because the you know, I was around when software development was kind of a new thing. And would these these were learned lessons learned that became best practices on how to develop software. Okay, well, there's a little bit of differences when it comes to a website but not a lot. So we learned some things like how to stop scope creep and how to how to control that content bottleneck and get it done on time within budget. So very good. That people don't know this stuff. And I thought, this is something I can share with the community. So that's why I created the academy.
Very good. There's a whole free level where they can folks can learn a lot of things as well as some premium upgrades. So take a look there in the chat. Let me share the slide link one more time. There's a link to the academy there and I think you'll have a deal for people if they want to join one of the premium levels. Is that right? We'll talk about that later.
Yeah, I've got some. I'll tell you a little bit more about that. And when we get to the end,
right. All right, so they're in this in the chat. You'll find the links to today's slides as well as the replay link that will contain the transcript of the chat log and everything the video of course, as we wrap up today, it takes about an hour to get all that stuff done. So take a look at that. And Beth let's get started. I'm excited.
Okay, um, I just have to move this window a little bit and I can't see okay, so for those who do not know me wait. There we go. I skipped a slide. I started life as a first grade teacher and then I went back to school to get my master's degree in training. I'm actually instructional design. And then after many, many years in corporate software development I started my own WordPress agency and then I realized that a lot of people in WordPress businesses were suffering from things I could help with. So that's why I formed the WP project managers Academy I still run my agency and I recently rebranded and pivoted to helping folks figure out what's not working with their website and then assembling the resources to fix it. So that's me in a nutshell. And my contact information is there feel free to reach out if you want to. So what is continuous improvement? Exactly? It may seem self explanatory, and it kinda is but here's what it truly is. It's a mindset. It's looking for better ways to do things. So you can become more effective and efficient. And by the way, there's a word for that. It's called efficacious. I love that word. It means both effective and efficient. So that's what we're looking for is to become a more efficacious agency. So the whole idea is to remove waste or inefficiencies from intangible processes, and create a better end product and a more efficient way. Now this is, this is an old project management question. There Firefox. Five frogs sitting on a log for the frogs decide to jump off how many frogs are left answering the chat how many frogs are left? Tell me what the answers are. Nathan, I'm not watching the chat. Is anybody answering? Nobody's universally five. Exactly. So you guys know the answer. Because having the intent to do something, doesn't mean that you're going to actually do it and that when it comes to continuous improvement, you really have to do it. We're turning thoughts into actions. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about the objective of continuous improvement. What you're going to want to do is identify what you do well, where do you struggle, what seems broken? What is starting to crack under the pressure of growth, and then develop a plan. So it's really just a two step process. It's just that first step has a lot of sub steps in it. And then there are four types of continuous improvement. There is business process improvement, project process improvement, self improvement and agency improvement. These are the most common and we're gonna look at each one of these in a little more detail. Well, actually, yeah, we're gonna look at each one of these in a little more detail. So business process improvement. That would be things like your accounting, hiring, outside resources, onboarding, decision making, raising prices, that sort of thing. Project process improvement is stuff like your proposal or your contract of course if you're using monster contracts, there is no improvement to be done. You it's it's perfect in every way. So your discovery process, you know, I don't think you can ever stop improving that process controlling scope creep, managing clients guaranteeing on time delivery and those sorts of things. Then self improvement is things like never stop learning, which is my tagline, be a better salesperson, be a better project manager, automate those sorts of things for self improvement, and then you've got agency improvement. Now, it's a little different than business process improvement but that because this is more about positioning, I'm going through this really fast because we're gonna get to the meat of what we're talking about in a minute, where I'm going to slow down and we're gonna talk about that a little a little bit more. So agency improvement is more about positioning your client base networking, building industry, relationships and things like that. So but today, we're going to talk mostly about business and project continuous improvement. But the principles that we're going to talk about can be applied to any area of continuous improvement, even if that's a personal thing for you. So let's jump right in and talk about the oh, let's jump to the top level really and talk about the best practice process. Yes, another process. So in order to develop best practices, practices, what we do is we identify lessons learned, but the good ones and the bad ones. We decide what improvements we're going to make and we test those improvements. Then we assess the results of that test and then adjust if we need to, because not every time that we decide to improve something, it may not turn out to actually be an improvement. Sometimes it hurts the process. Sometimes with automation, that can actually be the case because we're trying to automate so much that we end up muddying up the whole process, assess the result and adjust, develop the best practice and then implement the best practices. Now the first step is where the real meat of the continuous improvement process happens. Okay. And that's about lessons learned. But with best practices, you are going to lay the so when you're, when you're talking about developing best practices, you want to lay the groundwork, okay, so what you're going to do there is you're going to set up a system or a process by which you capture lessons learned. Okay, that's laying the groundwork for best practices. You're going to keep a log of lessons learned. You just need to record them somewhere. Because making a change, okay, this project, this thing happened. So now we're going to change it. Well, if that's not a continue, if that's not something that happens on a regular basis, you might be actually hurting yourself by making a change based on that one project or that one thing that happened in that one project, not always but sometimes. You want to be intentional. You need to try to make this a habit. It's a really hard thing to do because it's painful and tedious. But that the payoff at the end is really so good. If you like to be organized and you like for things to run smoothly. This is a good way to implement those improvements in your business and then so you're going to create a plan and when you create that plan, it becomes a project. So your continuous improvement efforts actually become a project because what is a project it has a beginning and an end with activities and tasks in the middle. And that's that makes it a project
just by definition. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about lessons learned.
So what are lessons learned, lessons learned or experiences distilled from a project that should be actively taken into account for future projects? So in a nutshell, you're going to want to record what went right. And why did it go right? What went wrong and why? Did it go wrong? And why is that important? Because you want to avoid the problems happening again in the future. You want to identify general process improvements, duplicate success. That's the most important thing you asked me that question early on Nathan. You know why is this important? Because you want to duplicate your success and not duplicate you're not successes. I'm trying not to use negative language. You want to build upon the successes and lessons of your prior projects. So those are all sort of related to one another but they all have a common goal, which is continuous improvement. And as I said before, it's a method for identifying opportunities for streamlining work and reducing waste, and it should be happening all the time. Now here's the lessons learned process. Remember, we talked about you're going to identify, the next step is then you're going to document then the next step is you're going to analyze those lessons learned, and then you're going to apply them so let me break these down. A little bit further. That's one of the principles in our project management academy is break the job down, makes things easier to absorb. It makes just things easier to do all around. Okay, so here are the ways you can identify lessons learned throughout the project, but you will not do that. No matter how hard you try this thing that's negative, I should take that off. But history tells us that this is a really hard thing to do and start making notes about what went right and what went wrong while the project is going on, but it's a really good goal to have where it mostly happens. Is it project debrief meetings, or we used to have actually Lessons Learned meetings. It's really hard for this not to turn into a moaning session. I use that word rather than the one that starts with a B and rhymes with ditch. Because this is our opportunity to complain about the client, this is our opportunity to complain about another team member. This is our opportunity to complain about the way the boss decided we were going to do this and that and the other and that is not the purpose of this at all. So it's really so somebody has to be in charge that keeps it from spiraling down into that kind of conversation. So it's about what went wrong, what went right and why and I'm going to tell you even give you a little tool here in a minute that you can use to determine the root cause of things. I hate to use the term root cause because it's become such a political word these days, but sorry I have an HMI.
But that's but but I'm gonna give you a tool here in a minute that's gonna tell you how to do that. Okay, so what normally happens is project debrief meetings. You can do this with surveys, if it's a really big project, maybe the client has a big team too. You might want to send out some sort of survey to ask people what went right with the project what went wrong, and that is one good way to keep from having a moaning session about you know, this is all the things that were horrible on this project. And review status reports. Now if you use Nathan's, like Friday, client status reports that he that he talks about where here's what we were planning to do, here's what we actually did. Here's what we didn't do and why we didn't do it. You know, it's just a bulleted list, but then there should be a section on the status reports for issues, risks that got that actually became to fruition and you had to do something about it. All of that should be reflected somewhere on the status report. So by going back and reviewing those status reports, you can find places that things maybe went awry. Now if you're doing if you're following a project management methodology, where you keep a risk and issues log and you should be you can review those logs as well. I'm sorry, sometimes I get into my WP grandma method and say this is what you should be doing. But it's only because I want to help. The other thing is to review the project notebook. Now that's another thing we teach inside the academy is the importance of keeping a project notebook. Basically, it used to be a paper notebook. I honestly used to be a big old fat binder that we would put on our shelf and then we would make a copy and give it to the client and so the client will always have that on their shelf. If something happened to us, they had a documentation of the project and all of the approvals that happen and all of the reasons that things were delayed basically it's just a you know, like a diary of the project. And then if they have to recreate anything, it's got all the technical stuff there too. Um, so but we do this electronically now it used to be a paper thing. So that's another way is to go back through and review the project notebook and all the elements that are part of that and we teach you all about that in the academy. Okay, so when you're documenting lessons learned it's actually so you need two things. You need a repository and you need a set of categories that you're going to categorize these lessons learned into. Yeah, let me back up just a minute and say this. Sometimes a lesson learned is such a big thing that you need to change it right away. So let's use Nathan's updating the contracts and becoming monster contracts over time. There are certain things that happened that he said, I'm never gonna let this happen again. So I'm gonna update my contract. In that case it is it's so evident that it's something that needs to be changed that it makes sense to do that. In other cases, it's just here's a list of everything that went right. Here's a list of everything went wrong. Okay, after time of doing several projects, let's look back and see if there's any trends. Let's look back and see if there's, like, is everything falling into the same category as to where we're falling out? You know, maybe maybe it's our estimating. Maybe we're not, maybe our estimates are way off. But by following this process, you can find that out. So when we talk about a repository, it's really best if you use a database, but basically you can do it on a spreadsheet. You know, now that you have airtable, which is like a combination of a spreadsheet and a database. I've never actually used it because I'm afraid that once I start using it, I'll be so entrenched in it, I won't get any work done. I love that sort of stuff. So I haven't used it but I hear that that it's fabulous for that sort of thing. But when should you look at everything in your database or spreadsheet and begin analyzing? Well, we'll get to that in just a minute first. So as I said, when you when you're when it comes to repositories, it can be a spreadsheet, it can be a database, like MS Access or our air table. And you know, they actually have lessons learned software. Of course, if you were managing really big projects, enterprise type projects, that might be something you want to invest in. Like I said, this is a whole discipline in identifying, tracking and implementing continuous improvement. And it's a big thing in the software development arena as part of their assessments that they get for the maturity of their software development process. Okay, some of the categories that you might want to use are, like lead acquisition, maybe this is a lead acquisition issue, or it's a project closeout issue. It's a technology stack issue. So these are the ways you can categorize these lessons learned as you're recording them. And then of course, my phone goes off. I forgot to silence it, sorry. And then, so the next step is to analyze those lessons learned. So when do you want to analyze the ones that you've collected? Well, basically whenever the notion is trying to but also, when there's a lot in one category, when you want to update a process anyway, you're gonna want to go back and look at your lessons learned and see okay, just like I said, there's there's an evident 100% evident need, we need to change this process. But let's go back and look at the other lessons learned about this process too, and see if we need to do anything else at the same time that maybe wasn't as urgent. Anytime you have natural downtime, you know, we have so much of that right where we're just looking for something to do in our business. doesn't happen often but it is one one spot where you can decide to analyze your lessons learned. Okay? So, when you're analyzing lessons learned, what you're trying to do is find the root cause of things and one tool to do that is the five why's. It's a thinking tool for identifying root causes. It helps you to move past the blame to think beyond the specific context of a problem and identify a proper solution to improve Hold on one moment. I need to cough once.
Thank you, I recently had a cold and still have a little semblance of that. Basically the let's see, lost the ability to use my mouse. There we go. Starts with a problem statement and then you ask why until the root cause is revealed and the answers become silly. So let's look at an example. So our blog writing process is slow. Why? Because the blogs are usually tossed around between several team members and go through several editing cycles. Why? Because we don't have anyone who owns that process. So it seems like everyone's responsibility and no one's responsibility at the same time. Why? Because we've never decided on a clear process for blogging. Why? Because we're busy. So you see how this drill down into what is the root cause we're too busy to develop a process so that we can speed up our blog writing process so then you would then start analyzing your lessons learned from that perspective. Hope that makes sense. I had some other examples but in the interest of time we I left them out. But now once you've done all that, how do you apply the lessons learned? Well, lessons learned are generally applied the three areas not all the time, but generally they fall into these three areas, creating an improving your templates, creating and improving your processes, and then implementing automation where possible. Some of the best advice I ever got was actually from Brad Morrison go WP was do it manually before you automate. So implementing automation may be something that happens on a regular basis because now you've tried this manually and you've decided to it actually can be automated. And so when you apply lessons learned that's when it becomes a best practice. So you're gonna document test, adjust and adopt. And so when you apply that it becomes a best practice. So that is all I know about continuous improvement. So but before we wrap up and take questions, just in case you want to learn more about this topic or other project management topics, I wanted to tell you, we just recently added a project manager skills self assessment quiz. To our homepage. So you might already be a project manager. But if you're interested to find out where you fall on the spectrum, starting from like novice to expert, you can tell it's only 12 questions, so you can take this quiz on our homepage at WP roadmaps.com. This will put you on our email list but you can always unsubscribe and it won't hurt my feelings. I get it okay, but if you're getting value from our emails or you want to hang around with us, then it might be a good thing, right. So, also, I wanted to tell you that we mentioned it earlier if you want to learn how to consistently complete WordPress projects on time within budget with features that meet your client's business requirements. This is the big part of that last part in print sees without sacrificing profit. Then you can join the Academy WP roadmaps.com forward slash join us we have the two memberships as Nathan mentioned one is free and gives you access to the project management 101 roadmap. The other one is premium program but I'm gonna tell you how you can save money on that in a minute. But the premium membership has both project management 101 and the complete project management roadmap which has all a whole bunch more done for you templates and processes and problem solving roadmaps and lessons from industry experts including Nathan Ingram, and then ongoing curated content from those folks as well. It's a monthly subscription that you can cancel at any time. And like I said, I'm gonna tell you how to save money on that in just a minute. But the added bonus to the WP project managers academy that I'm really excited about is that we recently finished launching our certification program we had level one launch but we hadn't lat launched level two, which is the more expert project management but you can become a certified WP project manager which is going to set you apart from the competition. Nobody's nobody thinks that clients care about this, but they do. They care so much about how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take and if you can tell if you can, if you can prove to them that you know how to get projects done on time within budget, then that just sets you apart from the competition because nobody else is doing it. But how this works is there's some exam, there's some quizzes. After you take the training, there's a final exam. For level two there's a few additional requirements having to deal with them having some social proof. That's another thing this does for you as it gives you social proof. And then once you once you satisfy all the requirements, you get this badge to put on your website, and customers can click on it and find out you know what this signifies in terms of your professionalism. Now some folks join the free program and then upgrade to the premium later. But here's how you can save money now and forever. If you think you want to join the premium program is I have a special ipmns discount because I love I themes training so much I keep signing up every year. Because I get so much out of it. But here's a special discount for anybody on this call and between now and February 12 which is my birthday, so I figured I'd just pick an arbitrary date like my birthday. So between now and February 12 You can get a $15 monthly discount with the coupon code. I seems 23 Now we are going to be increasing the price this year. And right now, the the level one certification is part of the free program that is going to be moving into the premium program. So you might want to go ahead and sign up for the premium program because you get both of them and you won't lose access to anything as we change things around this year. So and to find out more about this and to enroll in either one, WP roadmaps.com forward slash join us so here's my final slide that says thank you very much for watching my presentation on continuous improvement. I hope I didn't go too fast. You know, you always worry about I have too many slides. I'm never gonna get through them all. And then now it's only 230 or 230 Here 130 Where Nathan is. But as I said you can take the project management quiz on the homepage at WP roadmaps.com. If you want to get a copy of the slides, Nathan has them on the page for this replay. But I also have them at WP roadmaps.com forward slash speaking. And then if you're considering joining the academy WP roadmaps.com forward slash join us Hey, and even if Hold on a second, I gotta take a drink of water even if you don't care too much about that project manager quiz if you want to help me out just so I can test my funnel and make sure everybody's getting that because that what I do is once you finish that depending on where you land, I send you some additional resources of things that may help you in your quest to become a better project manager.
All right, thank you Beth. So folks, if you have questions, use the q&a button there on the zoom window and ask your questions now and Doug is starting out with a question that I was actually going to start out with myself which is Beth, you've given us a great overview of why it's important to track these processes. You know, how to evaluate when change needs to be made. Where do you put all this stuff? Like are there any tool and I understand it's not so much about the tool as much as it is the whole over the process? The tools can vary, but where do you store your SOPs? You put them in a database or they docs like how do you do that?
Where do I stay at a store the actual actual processes? Yes. Yeah, I just have those in board documents. I mean, quite honestly, I'm a solopreneur. I don't have to share them with anybody. So I have those in. Is there somebody else in our in our room? I see someone else on the screen that's weird. Britta Larson Bowers. Okay. Anyway, yeah, I just use Word documents but but to keep track of the there she's going to keep track of the updates. I do that in an Access database. But see, I'm a carryover from the old school and I know how to use Microsoft Access. So it's easy for me but for most people, that's the learning curve. They don't want to jump over.
Yeah, it's interesting. We just had a discussion about this not two hours ago in my advanced coaching group. One of the participants brought this very issue of how do you track you know, what tools do you use to track? You know, your SOPs, and it was a really good discussion between several folks that are doing what we do very well. And, you know,
I just want to say what do you mean by track your SOPs? What is it? What did that mean exactly?
Where do they live? You know, like you have yours in Word doc in Word docs and that absolutely works. If you have a team of folks, then, you know, having those documents on your local computer, probably not the best idea, right? Yeah. And so the discussion filtered out pretty well, where it was, Google Docs seemed to be the best spot you know, if you're using Google workspace for your team, then you know, having each SOP or checklist in a standalone Google doc was very helpful.
And there are tools that are totally niched, down to this specific things standard operating procedures and keeping troll Yeah. And then sharing them and that sort of thing. But see, for most of us, that's probably trying to kill an animal, this Dodge hammer. Yeah.
Yeah. It depends on whether or not your processes are just for you, or are they shared with others. And so if they have to be shared with others, and you have to figure out that collaboration piece, there was also a really good tool that was shared and I'm gonna pull this app. Let's see here. What was it called? If Paul Taubman is here? He's not Paul actually shared this tool, and it was quite good. It is called my goodness I love to look at our tango tango.us. And so this is super cool. It's a it's a tool that is a Chrome extension. And it allows you to record a process. And as you're doing it, it's taking like if you click something, it takes a screenshot of that, where you can just pull that out and paste it right into a Google Doc. So it, you know, it's transcribing what you say, as I understand it, and adding those screenshots. And you can just paste it into Google Doc, which sounds really cool to me. I haven't tested it personally,
I've used it. I've used it to do that for a client, because they didn't want a video they wanted well, and I tried to document everything in paper as well, because they lose those videos. Or the links to the videos. But yeah, I've used it. It's a great tool for that.
Yeah. And so some folks in the chat are talking about Trello and Trello is a great option for storing checklists and procedures. Maybe not so good for tracking revisions to those but you know, for years when I you know, I would have a Trello board with you know, a bunch of shared checklists and you could just share from you know, like the check the card on this board over to the actual project board very easily. And so forth. Melanie's mentioning something called IO rad. I've never heard of that. You have a link, Melanie drop it in the chat. And yeah, like Stephanie saying, whatever environment you're in, like if you're in 365, office 365 With SharePoint something like that. Yeah. If you have a team that needs to share your procedures, then obviously it needs to be in the cloud someplace.
Right? Well with you and it's your team is primarily just you and Chris, right. You have other people that you hope that you contract out to but but for the most part, it's just the two of you. So where do you do?
Thanks for are in Google Docs for the most part. Yeah. Doug would also like to know if you have project templates that you use in your agency. You mean like project plans? I'm not quite sure what do you mean? Yes.
He says yes. Yes. We are. In fact I in the, in the project managers Academy we use. The one that I use, of course has to be tailored every time not every project is the same but certain things are the same. You know, we got to do a sitemap. We're gonna do some wireframes. Well, we do in our business not and not everybody does. Wireframes. So yes, and the premium students as they as they progress and get certified at level two, get extra project plans. For things like E commerce, and memberships and those sorts of things right now. It's just from you know, developing the website from scratch.
Yeah, Melanie's also mentioning loom Of course, which is a great, great option to record videos and make those available.
That's true. And you know, now that there's so many transcription, software, Otter AI, D screw up to all of those things that will also do the captions that will let it's primarily the purpose is closed captions, but you can take those things, and then you know, if your client prefers a document, put that in the document as well. repurpose that content.
So Amelia has a question here. She says she uses clickup and airtable for everything. Do you recommend moving to tango?
Those Those don't do the same? thing? Yeah. Tango is, uh, is just simply a way to document a process that has a lot of clicks and, and documents and stuff, right?
Yeah, so Tango is like a replacement for loom. It's a video recorder so you know if you're running clickup for your you know, your agency, project manager when you get airtable tracking, you know, database details. It's some place where your SOPs live. You would use Tango or loom or something like that to record videos and capture that information.
Yeah, and I have not like I said, I have not delved into the airtable world because I know it will suck me in and I will never come out. So I love databases. I love things like that, which is why I still use Microsoft Access when nobody else does. But I find I think that that is probably the best place to keep anything database related, if you're already using it.
So one of the things that came out of the discussion that as I mentioned we just had earlier today and one of my in my larger coaching group is the importance of like it's a it's a risk to be fully wedded to something like click up to run your whole agency, for example, like what happens, like if all of my SOPs and everything about my business is in this one app. What happens if that app goes away or it gets acquired and changed and whatnot?
And so let's do this exact question in office hours this past week.
Yeah, it's interesting. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why in at least in our discussion in this group, we sort of we sort of landed on using something more ubiquitous, like Google Docs, which, you know, the likelihood of that being around for a while is pretty high.
Yeah, it's just another case for stop being distracted by the next shiny tool. Just because it's cool and can do these things does not mean that you should be using it.
Yeah, by the way, there's nothing wrong with clickup and um, you know, you know, we use a different project management tool. Yeah. But, you know, that's, we have a lot of our documents that stays in Google Docs, just for this reason. So yeah. Okay, good question from Sally here. Sally says could you give a practical example of a start to finish process that would help to simplify all of this, like, how would you take ideas through implementation? How do you would you put that into practice some of the methods you suggest, like a quick summary of the whole process of documenting and maybe revising?
Right. Okay. So documenting. You just have to document it and then test it against what you did and did I document it correctly or not? Or have a second set of eyes look at it depending on whether you got a team or not? When you're updating it, okay, so it's best just not to think about your your SOPs as silos, right? Is just think about this lessons learned process as a thing you do as part of your project. breakdown or debrief or close out right as part of your closeout activities. You're going to record the lessons learned from the project. You do that project one, project two, project three, okay, now, it's six months later, and you say, You know what, let's go back and look at our lessons learned. And see if there's any trends. If there's anything we want to address, we want to fix it, especially if somebody keeps complaining about the same thing. You I mean, you already know in your head, alright, people keep complaining about this. We need to fix it. And that's when you would set you would sit down with your team or sit down with yourself and say, Okay, let's see if I can think of an example. I'm under estimating. We keep under estimating because we keep forgetting to estimate the time it takes to have a status meeting with the client. That's perfect example because it's that's the kind of stuff that people forget right? The talk that I'm doing in Birmingham this this weekend is how to get paid for every little thing you do. And what I talked about there is if you don't know every little thing you do, you can't get paid for every little thing you do. So you need to write it down. Right. So I mean, it's that's what I mean. It's tedious. You only have to do it once though is you just sit down and you write down every little tiny step you take, you know, that's involved in it. It might not be in the final document, but it's the only way to know exactly what you're doing and are you estimating properly for that activity? Does that answer the question? I was
I think we're getting there. You know, I think like something that we all do and like the classic example I've used for this whole process in very indifferent talks is like launching a website, right? Like, if you go to launch a website. If you've been building websites, you could probably do that in your sleep and you just kind of do it. But when you start to write down things step by step you know, the first time you do it, it's done, but it's never done. You know, these checklists and processes are out there living they always they can always be tweaked and refined. So writing down the steps for example of launching a website. Well then, you know, for me at least I put that away until the next time I do the task then I'll pull the checklist out. And I'll run the checklist and I'll realize oh wait, if you know step here number seven. If I move that up to step four, then that's less clicks. And so you optimize the flow over and over and over again and you know, the next four or five times you run it, you may make some you know, make some of those optimizations they start to get it starts to solve the a solidify just a little bit. And then it's really Oh, I learned this new thing. Let's add this or Wow, this is breaking now let's change this. It tends to be more event driven rather than process driven at that point. So you just iterate.
Right and that that's, that's an organic way for it to happen. But like I said, like you go through that checklist and you say, Okay, I want to move this. I think it makes more sense to move this to step three, instead of Step seven. Just document why you made the change because I'm telling you, you get older and you go, alright, wasn't that step seven. How did that get moved to step three? Right. So just, it's it's important to document everything. I'm sorry, it's, uh, yeah, the older I get, the less I remember.
Yeah. And you know, Doug has just made a good point in the chat of the value of these processes. Once you start to do, you know, you do this over and over and you really spend time refining them. There's great value in those. So make sure they're backed up. And you know it because if you lose those like that, it's a huge it's a huge piece of the value of your business. Yeah. It's a great point, though. And you
know, also as you grow, if now I don't intend to scale, I'm happy right where I am. But as you if you do, and as you grow, and you're not going to be the one doing it anymore, you're gonna have to hand it off to somebody else, the more refined and streamlined and tested and it's carved in Granite now because it works so perfectly, that you can have it the easier you're gonna make it for those people that you're onboarding. And the way that I think about it, is, if something were to happen to me, the pandemic made me think like this okay? If something were to happen to me, and so I don't have a lot of people that because I live alone and work from home, I don't have a lot of people that are close to me. Somebody, probably my brother who's only semi technical is going to have to take this stuff and do something with it, right? So for him to be able to have these things to hand off to somebody to help with that whole process would be you know, so in that respect, it's just something that is important to me from, you know, people keep telling me I'm 65 I'm not that old. I shouldn't be thinking like that, but the pandemic is what did it
Alright folks, any final questions for Beth before we start to wrap this up? It's been a good discussion today. Thank you, Beth, for your insight in all of this. Yeah, Sherry thinks she often needs to sketch things out in the diagram to you know, to draw out a process and, you know, that's why flowcharts were created.
I've done that many times because you get down to step three, and you're like, wait a minute, this needs to this was a yes or no option. So I need to I need to see how both are gonna go to get to the end. Yeah. Oh, good. I'm glad you liked it. Elizabeth. Thank you.
And Ben, you're exactly right. You know, when you look at at some point if you ever want to exit your business and I realize that for a lot of folks, they're not even thinking about that like I'm just I run my business to make ends meet. But it's not you know, if you if you're running your business, well, then at some point, you should have some value that you can sell. And there's two things that really bring a business value. The first is recurring revenue, which we talked about a lot here. The second is documented processes. Those are the things that are going to bring your business value what if and when you get ready to exit so very important, and so good, good reminder of how to do some of these things. So I'm going to share once again, the link to all of the things in the chat. We'll have the replay up in about an hour or so that will have the transcript of the chat log got some good resources and thoughts shared in the chat. One final reminder I will make is tomorrow we do have the webinar about setting up Cloudflare for your client sites. So if you haven't registered for that one yet, we that was a quick last minute addition last week. Some folks wanted that during the security webinar that we had I just dropped the link in the chat. I'm going to be instructing in that one on just a walk through Cloudflare how to set it up on your client site and how to, you know kind of work with Cloudflare along with clients. So join us for that tomorrow. Beth, any final thoughts as we're wrapping up here?
I'm personally looking forward to that tomorrow. Yeah, I'm excited about that. Um, no, just please understand that a lot of times, I'll give you the mack daddy version of a product of this whole discipline for continuous improvement. Scale it down if you need to, but just make sure that you're documenting those lessons learned.
Sorry, good. It's a great place to stop. Well, thanks again. Beth. Thank you all for being with us as well. I am back tomorrow at one o'clock for that Cloudflare webinar and we'll see you back here on iThemes Training, where we go further together.