Oct 27, 2017
Want to Streamline Your Nonprofit’s Processes?
With a little forethought and planning, you can eliminate unnecessary actions that waste time and resources. Here are a few steps to help you to streamline and improve your processes:
1. Choose the Process You Want to Improve
What do people hate to do or never gets done? What processes feel inefficient or unnecessarily complicated? What takes up the most amount of time? Starting with the biggest frustrations or time traps will not only yield big process improvements — staff members are likely to be motivated to help and you’ll be laying the foundation for a culture of continuous improvement.
At the beginning, you’ll also want to establish broad goals for your process improvement. What will make a difference to the health or effectiveness of your nonprofit? Would spending 20 percent less time on a process be a meaningful improvement? Document your goals and refer to them as you refine your process.
2. Gather Stakeholder Input
The people who do the work every day know the most about what works and what doesn’t in your current process. Talk to them and learn the intricacies of the process and ask them their ideas for how to make improvements.
3. Visually Document the Process
Grab post-it notes or pull out a big white board and write down all of the different steps in the process. Note timing, transitions, and other milestones or constraints. Laying it all out visually will help you see the sticking points and can make it easier to understand how rerouting or eliminating steps will affect the system as a whole.
4. Analyze and Find Areas to Improve
Take time to think through and talk about what you’re seeing. If something looks puzzling, ask why it’s done that way and how it can be done better. It sometimes helps to bring in stakeholders again to get their interpretation of what they are seeing.
5. Make Changes
Decide what needs to change and remap your process with your changes. Then talk about your new process with stakeholders and work on gaining their confidence in the new process. Change is often difficult because even though people might not like the current process, it’s known to them. In their minds the unknown could be worse. Take the time to show stakeholders how the new process works and why it is an improvement over the old way of doing things.
6. Evaluate and Refine
Even with a lot of stakeholder input and careful planning, your process is not likely to be perfect on day one. Build in ways to monitor your process and establish metrics for measuring whether your new process is meeting the goals you established at the beginning. If you’re falling short of your goals, look at the process map again and think about what else you can do.