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[–]rszrama 1 point2 points ago

Some of your earlier talks at DrupalCamps of yore focused on the importance of business processes. I'm curious to know what have been some of the most effective for you and perhaps any that weren't helpful that were later amended to be so. Do you have a meta process for creating and reviewing processes?

[–]benfinklea[S] 0 points1 point ago

Mr. Szrama! Thanks for jumping in here. A great question from the founder and master of the Prestigious Cheese Society. (Who also does something with commerce in his spare "non-cheese" time.)

Hmm...most effective processes or one that wasn't effective and became so...I think that both descriptions apply to our new employee on-boarding process. It's critical to the early success of a new hire to walk into a company where they feel like they belong, where they have all the things they need, and they can get up to speed quickly. Used to, I would start imaging a new machine on the person's first day. Installing this, doing that, setting up the wifi. 2 days later when they couldn't print, I'd install the printer. Such a waste of time!

I hired a local mac pro to set up a server and imaging software with preinstalled sets of software and user privs. Saves a huge amount of time every time. Then, we added some personality profiling and a bit of information gathering so that we could create employee information sheets for them. We've standardized the paperwork pack and try to have them fill everything out and bring it with them on the first day. When they walk in, we welcome them and start with the Vision, Mission and Values of the company. Then we walk them through our financial model so they understand how we make money. We go over the job description again. We train them on the tools that we use - Basecamp, our intranet, Harvest, Evernote, Google drive/docs, Skype, etc. We assign them a mentor - usually the last person that was hired - for them to have as a resource.

And so on. Each step is a task in a Basecamp template. Each task has a link to an associated process on the intranet. The new hire gets assigned some tasks on their own onboarding project so they get to use the tools right away and see how they work.

The outcome has been significant. New hires used to take a week or two before they were really ready to start producing. By training them how our systems work and how to follow our processes, new hires are working on client projects by the afternoon of their first day - with supervision, of course. Usually, these are recent grads with no prior Drupal or SEO experience.

And, yes, we have a "meta process". More on that in a sec. A great process for a services business has a few key components:

  • A trigger that signals you to do the process. I find that if a process doesn't have a trigger then it probably will never get done. For us, the task on a template in Basecamp is the trigger for most of our processes but there are others like when a new employee is hired or if there is a tradeshow coming up.
  • What information or tools are needed to complete the process - no sense getting halfway through a process only to find you need a client's Drupal admin login that you don't have.
  • The steps to do the process with enough detail that you're not guessing at stuff but not so much that it's tedious to follow. This is the hardest one to balance. I tend to err on the side of too much detail.
  • A way to document that the process has been done. This should be an outcome that is immediately evident. In other words, I should be able to take a screenshot (of a config page, maybe, or the home page - whatever) that shows that it's done. This is important for QA, especially if the work is being done without direct supervision i.e. outsourced to a third party.
  • A way to communicate that the process is done. i.e. Checking it off in Basecamp.

If you want to geek out on processes, read the book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Also, read this processes white paper.

So, here's my meta-process or what we call the "How to Write a Process" process. We recently built the details of creating a process into the Process content type on our intranet so it's not as step-by-step as we usually write but you'll get the point.

The Volacci Process Content Type

I could go on and on. Thanks for the question!

Blessed are you, Cheesemaker.

[–]memebreather 2 points3 points ago

Of course, not to be taken literally. All manufacturers of dairy products are equally blessed.