Walk into two organizations with the same operational complexity and the difference can be night and day. One organization runs like a well-oiled machine in spite of the fact that they are juggling multiple programs, compliance requirements, and administrative tasks.
The team seems untroubled, deadlines are consistently met and the organization grows by leaps and bounds without ever skipping a beat.
The other organization, however, is in a constant battle for survival. They are always behind the eight ball when it comes to documentation, the team is stressed out about compliance, and they struggle to take on any new work without it turning into a disaster.
You don’t even need to compare the capabilities of the employees, the size of the budget, or even the complexity of what they are handling.
These can be identical for all that matters. What sets them apart is how they’ve structured their operations, what infrastructure supports their work, and whether they have a capacity to deal with complexity or are still using infrastructure designed for simpler times.
The Infrastructure They Use
The organizations that manage complexity with ease have invested in proper infrastructure to support their operations.
They no longer rely on spreadsheets and disparate systems; instead, they have developed integrated solutions that reflect how work actually flows in and out of the organization. Information moves between functions instead of needing to be manually passed from one employee to another.
Work that is done frequently has been streamlined and often automated. Documentation happens as a byproduct of work being done, not some additional burden that needs to be dealt with afterward.
The infrastructure doesn’t need to be sophisticated or expensive, however. It just needs to suit what the organization does.
An organization that provides training and has to keep track of hundreds of students will need a different set of systems than a consulting organization that tracks the projects it delivers to clients. However, in both cases, once they reach a certain scale, they will need something sturdier than email and a shared drive.
Organizations that still operate with improvised infrastructure struggle with friction. Every task needs to be done in a roundabout way because there is no proven method for achieving the desired outcome.
Information gets lost or duplicated. Errors are made because there is no system in place to catch mistakes. Employees have to spend cognitive energy trying to figure out how to do things instead of simply doing them.
The Ease with Which They Document Their Work
The properly functioning organizations have found ways to make documentation happen as people do their work instead of as a separate task that needs to be completed later on.
When employees finish their work, the record of what they have accomplished is automatically generated or takes little effort to produce.
The required reports are geanerated from information that already existed instead of needing to be recreated after the fact.
The system being used for documentation effectively transforms this from a burden into a byproduct of doing work. Employees don’t have to spend hours at the end of each month compiling reports from all the things they need to report on.
They aren’t facing a race against time trying to recreate pieces of information that should have already been captured by the system. The system simply takes care of these documentation requirements as work is being completed.
Organizations that struggle with complexity tend to treat documentation as something separate from “real work.” Employees finish their tasks and then have to make sure that what they did is documented somewhere else.
This creates two tasks for each piece of work completed, relies on memory that decays quickly, and the documentation debt builds up until it becomes unmanageable.
Standard Operating Procedures for Just About Everything
The organizations that manage complexity well have standardized their processes for everything that happens frequently while still retaining flexibility where it matters. Routine tasks are handled in ways that result in consistency and compliance.
Employees don’t have to find new ways to complete tasks that happen frequently. The wheel isn’t reinvented for every task that gets done regularly. Instead, work is guided by templates or checklists or standard operating procedures.
For training organizations that deal with compliance requirements that are as strict as US Federal regulations, having established approaches to tasks that happen frequently makes compliance manageable.
Some of the best RTO training plan software available help manage this by ensuring the required elements are included in these plans while still allowing flexibility in how training plans are developed depending on a range of customization requirements.
Having standardized processes reduces how much employees need to think about tasks that happen regularly and how these tasks should be approached.
Instead of wasting cognitive energy on decisions that don’t need to be made regularly, they can devote their attention to aspects of their work where their judgement or creativity is needed instead.
Organizations where nothing is standardized justify this decision by being “creative” or valuing freedom above all else. This leads to inconsistencies, makes training new employees more difficult, and there is less room for improvement when there isn’t an existing process that can be made more efficient.
The Operations Are Proactive Instead Reactive
The organizations that handle complexity effortlessly practice proactive operational management. They intervene before something develops into an emergency.
They maintain their systems and their processes and they plan for busy periods rather than simply being caught by surprise every time something unexpected happens.
Many of these processes make them proactive about compliance and regulatory requirements too. Instead of leaving everything until the last minute when an audit is about to happen, they maintain standards of audit readiness all the time.
Their documentation is always current. Their processes are always monitored to ensure they still meet requirements. Issues are identified before they develop into disasters during an external review or audit.
The organizations where everyone is constantly running around putting out fires operate reactively. Everything is a crisis that needs to be responded to urgently.
They can never get around to updating their processes and systems or maintaining their infrastructure because there’s always another fire to put out first. In these cases, organizational debt builds up faster than can possibly be handled.
Knowledge Management Practices
The organizations that handle complexity well know how to capture knowledge in a way that employees can share it with one another appropriately, preventing institutional knowledge from being held only in specific individuals’ memory banks.
Processes don’t only exist as tribal knowledge within departments or teams; when new employees start working for the organization, they can find answers to questions without interrupting busy team members who do know how things used to be done by learning it. The knowledge captured by the organization stays relevant even if there are changes in team members.
This doesn’t require sophisticated systems or excessive resources. There just needs to be discipline when it comes to documenting decisions and keeping all procedures current.
The employees in these organizations don’t waste time answering the same questions repeatedly and they don’t become less effective when team members leave.
Organizations without proper knowledge management practices operate like living organisms without lifelines when key team members are unavailable.
They become stuck when people leave because knowledge was never captured in a useful manner when knowledge becomes tribal in nature rather than organizationally documented. New employees take ages to get up to speed with training because there aren’t any documents to refer back to.
The Compound Effects of Solid Structures
Everything associated with having solid organizational structures compounds over time in a positive manner for organizations that handle complexity effortlessly. They experience gains in terms of capacity over time because their streamlined processes free up resources so they can invest in improving how they operate further.
For those organizations without sound structures supporting their operations, however, everything builds up negatively over time. Issues compound until it seems like there will never be an end in sight for dealing with them. Employees become burnt out because there is never enough time or capacity to tackle issues as they arise.
The organizations that overcome challenges with complexity didn’t arrive at this point by accident. They made decisions purposefully about how to structure their operations and what platforms they would invest in and use.
The returns on these investments last forever thanks to improvements in efficiency and even provide energy for innovation and growth over time!
