Sometimes the Business Isn’t as Complicated as It Looks

A business owner once came to me with what appeared to be a software problem. His team worked on several different types of projects, and they were convinced that each type needed its own workflow in their project management system. The differences were real. Some projects took longer than others, certain notifications depended on the type of project, and some stages could be delayed while waiting for information or work from people outside the business. The team knew these details because they dealt with them every day.
The challenge wasn’t understanding the differences. It was stepping back far enough to see what those differences meant for the overall process.

Looking at the business from a different angle

When you’re close to a process, the differences naturally stand out. One project follows a different path from another, one customer needs something unusual, and one type of work takes longer than another. After years of working this way, it is easy for those variations to become the way the business itself is structured in people’s minds.

That can lead to a reasonable but not necessarily accurate conclusion: if the work is different, the process must be different too.

The useful question is slightly different: What is actually different, and what is simply a variation within a common process?

That distinction was important with this business. The goal wasn’t to make all of the projects look the same. They weren’t. The goal was to identify the structure they shared, then understand which differences were important enough to be handled differently within that structure.

As the team talked through their processes, it became clear that much of the underlying workflow was common. The differences still mattered. Some projects had different expected timelines, some triggered different notifications, and some depended on outside parties or information before they could move forward. But those characteristics didn’t necessarily require completely separate workflows.

The project management software they were already using could accommodate the common process while using a relatively small number of additional fields to capture the information that was genuinely unique to each project type.

The solution became simpler without pretending that the business was simple.

Why stepping back can be difficult

This kind of situation is common because the people who know a business best are often the people who find it hardest to step outside the detail.
That isn’t a criticism. Their knowledge is exactly what makes the business work. They know the history, the exceptions, the customer expectations and the reasons behind decisions that may look unnecessary to someone encountering the process for the first time.
The difficulty is that all of that knowledge is connected in their heads. When they describe a process, they naturally include the details that matter in the particular situation they’re thinking about. Someone else may hear those details and see a separate process, even though the person doing the work sees them as variations of something they already understand.
This is where an outside perspective can be useful. Not because the outsider knows the business better, but because they can listen to the details without having to carry all of them at once. That makes it easier to compare situations, notice patterns and ask whether a difference actually needs to change the underlying process.
In this case, the owner was pleasantly taken aback by how much of what he knew about the business could be summarized once the common structure had been identified. His reaction was essentially, “You’ve taken my 35 years of experience and succinctly summed it up in five minutes.”
The five minutes didn’t replace those 35 years. They gave the experience a different frame.

The same problem can show up in financial information

The same thinking applies when a business owner feels that their financial information isn’t giving them useful answers.
It is tempting to start by looking for a better report, more detail, a different chart of accounts or different software. Those things may eventually be part of the solution, but they don’t tell you what the information actually needs to accomplish.
Suppose an owner says they want more detail because they need to decide what to focus on next year. The first question I’d want to understand is what kind of decision they’re trying to make. Are they comparing different types of work? Trying to understand which customers or services contribute most to the business? Looking at where their time is being spent? Trying to understand why revenue has grown without producing the expected cash?
Those questions require different information.
The same principle applies to operational systems. Before asking how software should handle a process, it helps to understand what the business needs the process to accomplish, what information needs to be captured, and which differences genuinely matter.
That is why I tend to start with the business question rather than the software.

From business knowledge to useful information

My role in this kind of work is not to tell someone how their business should operate. The people doing the work already know far more about that than I ever could. My job is to help them step back from what they know, recognize the patterns within it, and translate that understanding into processes that people can follow and systems can support.
That combination of business and systems experience is particularly useful when the problem sits between the two. A business process can make perfect sense to the people who use it but still be difficult to represent consistently in software. A system can be capable of capturing useful information but be structured in a way that doesn’t reflect how the business actually works.
The goal is to bring those perspectives together.
Once the business question is clear, it becomes easier to decide what information matters. Once the important information is clear, it becomes easier to determine what needs to be captured and how. And once the process is designed around those needs, the software becomes a tool for supporting the business rather than something the business has to organize itself around.

A useful place to start for next year

Autumn is a natural time to look at what has happened so far and think about where you want to put your attention next year. If something in your business feels unnecessarily complicated, this may be a good time to resist the urge to immediately change the system or add more information.
Instead, step back and ask what you are actually trying to understand or decide. Then look at what is common in the process, what is genuinely unique, and what information you need in order to make the decisions that matter.
You may find that the process really does need to change. You may discover that the system you’re already using can do more than you thought. Or you may realize that the problem isn’t the system at all. You simply hadn’t yet separated the important differences from all the surrounding detail.
That’s often where clarity begins.
Not by knowing less about the business, but by stepping back far enough to see what all that knowledge is telling you.

Lynda Davidson, LD Business Focus
Quickbooks Advanced ProAdvisor & Business Systems Strategist

Helping business owners get clear, reliable information from their systems

photo by L. Davidson – skyward and close-up view of an autumn Sugar Maple branching out from trunk