How Can I Improve My Workflows?

Workflow improvement is an iterative process that involves continuous analysis and refinement to make your workflows more efficient and effective. Fortunately, Pneumatic was designed from the ground up with continuous improvement in mind. Workflow templates can be easily edited with all the changes you make being applied to running workflows in real-time. In this post, we’ll discuss how to improve workflows by analyzing statistics, identifying bottlenecks, and editing workflow templates to rectify issues.

Set Up Benchmarks

Any improvement only makes sense if you have clearly defined criteria for what end goal you want to achieve. So, once you’ve designed a workflow template, you want to set expectations for it, such as how long should this type of workflow take to complete on average, how much time should be spent for each step etc.

Collect Data

Once you’ve set performance criteria for your business process, the next step is data collection. You need to collect real-life metrics of your workflow performance to see whether you’re hitting the targets you’ve set for this type of business process. This way, you can be alerted to any issues that might arise once you start running workflows from the template: some stages may take far longer than expected, or entire workflows might get abandoned by your team. Remember that identifying these issues early on is actually a good thing.

Plan How to Handle the Problems

Once issues have been identified, the next step is to plan corrective action. For example, if a particular stage always takes too long to complete, you may need to break it down into several sub-tasks to make it more manageable. Alternatively, you may need to assign more resources to the stage to help speed up the process.

Rectifying issues with your workflows means going back into the underlying workflow template and editing it accordingly. For instance, you may assign more performers to a specific stage in the process, add extra steps, or include a checklist in a step to better structure it and make sure all the performers assigned to it know what each of them is supposed to do.

Rinse, Repeat

Continuous improvement never stops, and workflow refinement is an iterative process: you make changes and then go back and look at the workflow metrics again to see whether things have improved. It is quite common that when improvements are made in one area, problems are discovered in another, so you want to continue tracking and monitoring your workflows.