Running a tight ship isn’t always the easiest job in the world, particularly if your business operates across markets or overseas. Things can quickly degrade and disintegrate before your eyes.
However, sometimes the signs that your business is disorganised are more subtle. It’s not just about paperwork strewn across your desk or people failing to show up for shifts on time. Therefore, this blog outlines some tests you can use to discover whether your business is a model of operational perfection or simmering chaos under the surface.
Test 1: Communications Audit
The first test to try is a communications audit. You want to see how data crosses teams and departments, and whether they are sharing information effectively with each other.
Check for perverse incentives that prevent individuals from working together. Try to see if there are any interdepartmental conflicts of interest or competitive arrangements. preventing information transfer.
Test 2: Customer Feedback
A second test could be to collect customer feedback and find out more about what your end-users think about your products and services, not just your internal metrics. Take time to go through complaints and support tickets to see what’s going wrong. Look for evidence that customers are confused or struggling to navigate your services effectively.
Test 3: Process Mapping
You can also try processing mapping to see how everything in your organisation works from the top level. This approach can help you identify issues in the chain of work that could be slowing you down or fostering the development of redundancies.
Check that you are managing inventory correctly and distributing it effectively. Ensure you have adequate shipping container storage and other systems to handle sudden spikes in stock levels. Ensure that you have systems, people, and software in place to deal with these gluts when they occur.
Test 4: Industry Benchmarks
If you are struggling to determine the level of organisation in your business, you can also use industry benchmarks as a rough guide. Knowing how the average firm in your sector is performing tells you whether you are moving along the right lines.
For example, if your productivity is significantly lower than that of your rivals, it is a sign that your business isn’t functioning how it needs to. There are bottlenecks in the system that are hampering your productivity and preventing you from reaching your potential.
Finding and correcting excessive errors or high customer churn could mean you need to fix internal disorganisation, such as adding a cloud CRM or using project management tools that provide greater oversight.
Test 5: Data Analysis
Finally, you can rely on data analysis tools to tell you whether your business is disorganised chaos. This approach won’t usually provide any insights into why your business can’t organise itself, but it can function as an early indicator that something is wrong.
Various data tools are available that cover customer satisfaction and productivity. Keep an eye on these figures and identify the factors that cause them to rise or drop. Try to get to the bottom of issues as soon as they occur for clearer identification of the root cause.
