Welcome And The Process Problem

Michael Hartmann 0:24

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the no pros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo today. In today's conversation, we're going to be talking about something that almost every marketing ops leader has felt, but never ever not everyone has knows how to diagnose. So why does it take so long to get anything out the door? Why do approvals multiply every time something breaks? Why do teams work harder and still not see better results? So, all about process. So joining me for that conversation today is my guest Joe Bacherstedt. He's a partner at Business Enterprise Mapping. Joe is a former PWC partner, has led CPG companies and has spent more than 30 years helping the mid-size and public companies untangle complex workflows and redesign how their organizations actually function. His firm maps entire business systems, including marketing, to show companies exactly why they're getting the results they're getting and what needs to change. So Joe, welcome to OpsGas.

Joe Bockerstette 1:24

Thank you, Michael. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today.

What A Business System Means

Michael Hartmann 1:27

Yeah, this is gonna be a fun and I think I think we talked about this. Uh I used to I I worked at Price Waterhouse and people go like, oh PWC. It's like, no, Chris Water before this evening. It was a difference, really. Yes, yeah. So uh bringing back old memories. All right. Well, let's what we start with um I when I introduced you, we use the term business system, right? I think probably has a lot of different I like people probably have different ideas in their mind, like what does that mean to you?

Joe Bockerstette 1:56

And maybe how is that different like from I guess documenting just some marketing processes in our business system is a collection of processes that fulfills one of the primary purposes of an enterprise, right? So at Business Enterprise Mapping, uh, we define 12 standard business systems uh in any enterprise, and that architecture allows us to uh compare work across industries and size and type, et cetera. So in some ways they're departments, but when you look at actual organizations, it doesn't always match up that way. For instance, marketing department, we would consider a marketing business system. For example, you would have a sales department would be a sales business system. And uh let's just take sales because I know we're gonna talk about marketing autodase. And so the purpose of a sales system is to deliver customers and orders, right? It exists in order to create orders that the operation system is gonna fulfill. And so when you look at an overall enterprise, a business system fulfills a key purpose that, when combined with other business systems, sort of fulfills the entire mission of the enterprise. And any given business system is comprised of a series of business processes that enable that business system to achieve its purpose.

Michael Hartmann 3:34

Okay. So this is like So I'm familiar with something called ELS. You probably have heard of it. Enterprise operating. So is it is it something kind of like that where it feels like that one that I I I'm not an expert at, but it sounds like it's that one I feel like has a little more bent towards organizational structure as opposed to this.

Marketing Purpose And Key Deliverables

Joe Bockerstette 3:53

Yeah. This is more, it's just more business model design, if you will, right? Uh leadership has a responsibility to design the mid business model that fulfills the purpose of that system of that enterprise. Let's take marketing, right? We'll just dive into marketing. So uh we've done a tremendous amount of marketing, both agencies and in-house. And they're all a little different, but I'm gonna generalize, right? In general, the purpose of marketing is to do what? Provide qualified leads, right? And so all activity in marketing is bent towards uh handing over to sales a qualified lead that sales can turn into a customer in an order, right? So when you frame the marketing system, where does it begin? Well, marketing as a system begins with a target market, a target uh community of uh of individuals, entities, whatever that you desire to turn into a qualified lead that we're gonna pass off to sales, right?

Michael Hartmann 4:57

What some people call the tan total addressable market kind of Yeah.

Joe Bockerstette 5:01

Exactly. Exactly. So in a pragmatic manner, we go into a new state, we open up a new state, right? So that state and the uh profile of our target customer becomes the target market, and our mission is to turn more of those target customers into qualified leads, right? Now, what do we do in order to make that happen? We have a series of processes, and it can vary greatly, but it's uh, you know, lead generation, social media content development, content management, web management, uh email outreach, advertising, marketing campaigns, like all of those are examples of processes that would begin maybe with an annual plan. That annual plan would turn into a campaign calendar, that campaign calendar would turn into campaigns, we would execute those campaigns using the various elements of content that uh informs them, and then would ultimately close out those campaigns with a successful lead generation uh capability that we turns uh that those targets into qualified leads we can pass on to sales.

Design Workflow Before Org Charts

Michael Hartmann 6:19

Okay. So I want to ask a couple questions. So if I and there's there's sort of a hierarchy for lack of a better term, of like you've got the marketing system, the market system, if you will, and then within that uh it's made up of processes and it's and then kind of the other thing you gave the example, then those processes get broken down, and then I guess you kind of overlay it in the organizational structure is becomes a part of how you you know enable that system to work.

Joe Bockerstette 6:49

Precisely. So we would argue that you design the business model first, being the workflow, and then you lay the organization structure on top of that workflow model so that the organization is in sync with the business model itself. Most times when we start work with clients, the organization structure is out of sync with the workflow model, right? And that's one of the reasons you get delays and uh approvals and uh disconnects, waste, right? It comes out of the fact that the org structure is out of sync with the actual work itself.

Michael Hartmann 7:30

Okay, so I want that's that's good. That's why I'm glad I confirmed that. Um the the other part, you mentioned marketing primary purpose to deliver leads to sales, especially in the B2B space industry. Uh I think there I and I think other people listening might argue that there's other purposes, like um, I mean you could I guess you can link it to ultimately to demand, but like I'm I'm yeah I my view of this has changed a little bit. Like the building brand awareness is part of that, right? Is looking a little further out in the future depending on what you're right. Like, so do you do you layer that in as well? Like, is that a separate process or is that a subsystem of marketing in the way you think about? How does that work?

Joe Bockerstette 8:18

No, it's part of the marketing system. Remember, I just said we were going to generalize at the front. Yeah, I just said curious. Yeah, but but I've got no uh hesitation to adopt brand awareness as well, right? Brand strength, all of that can fall. When you think of the purpose of a marketing system, it can be, you know, a half a dozen primary purposes, right? Uh, you know, lead generation being one, brand awareness being another, right? Um, but all of the processes that would exist inside those boundaries would be part of that same uh contribution to purpose. Now, each of those processes is a primary deliverable. So when you think about achieving the purpose of the system, I've got a series of deliverables that need to contribute to that purpose, right? So when I'm designing the business model of marketing, I need to look at what's the primary purpose of marketing, what are the deliverables that we need to produce in order to fulfill that purpose, and then what are the processes that we're gonna need in order to create those deliverables, right? So it's very hierarchically systematically built. So all the pieces of the puzzle fall in the right place in order to generate the overall purpose of our intention.

Agency Versus In House Differences

Michael Hartmann 9:39

Got it. Okay. So that again, glad I asked for that clarification. Let me so you mentioned that you work with you've worked with both sort of in-house, keep it to marketing, marketing corporations as well as agencies. Like what do you what are the similarities, the differences that you see between them from the standpoint?

Joe Bockerstette 9:58

So from the content itself, this they're they're all pretty similar, right? We have graphics, we have content management, we have social media, we have web, we have outreach, right? The we have campaigns. The difference between an agency and in-house are generally two things. Agencies generally have an account management function, the uh playmaker, if you will, between the client and the shop itself. And so they're funneling communications between the internal production and capabilities and project campaign management to the external customer. They're managing that relationship and the communication energy, the point primary point of communications. You don't typically see that in-house, right? The second component that you generally see with agencies are much more cost budget focused. An agency creates a contract with a client and it strives to make profit on that contract by tracking basically the internal projects that are executed in order to fulfill that contract. Right? Uh in-house, again, not so much. We don't generally see in-house agencies so concerned about that project management, contract cost relationship that you see in the external agencies.

Michael Hartmann 11:26

Okay. It's kind of considered more of a have a fixed cost for the overall organization as opposed to project-based cost.

Joe Bockerstette 11:34

That's right. Uh agencies are basically project management companies who execute contracts with clients, fulfill those contracts, and uh leave satisfied clients to uh create more contracts, we owe.

Michael Hartmann 11:49

Right, right. Yes, uh hopefully, yeah. Right. That's the goal. Yeah. I uh yeah, okay. Yeah, it's it's interesting. I hadn't thought about that difference that way in terms of the um you know the the al like the cost tracking piece, because I think in my experience mostly in-house, right, when I've been asked like can we allocate our costs to campaigns, for example, right? Like we can, but I wouldn't recommend it because anything that's sort of in by cost is like really hard to allocate as you know the number of things you're allocating to changes, you know, uh or something gets stopped or canceled, or it's just really hard. And like direct costly fine. Yes. Whereas agencies follow you to do that.

Joe Bockerstette 12:37

Agencies really that's their business, right? That's their core value proposition. The other thing I'll mention that I think is different about agencies, in my experience, is they're much more focused on the metrics of client satisfaction, uh, internal waste, uh lead time cycle times, much more focused on the operating metrics of uh performing well against those contract requirements and uh and testing the temperature of client satisfaction on how they're doing.

Perfectly Designed For Current Results

Michael Hartmann 13:08

Yeah. Makes sense. Um I remember when we talked before, you there's an idea that you see if I get it right, every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Right. So what does that mean? Uh then in an especially maybe especially if we're a marketing team that's maybe for a market me ops team, and considering that's our main audience, frustrated with their own skier to performance.

Joe Bockerstette 13:34

Yeah, so that quote goes back to a book called Designing Organizations for High Performance by David Hannah out of Proctor and Gamble back in the 80s or 90s. I worked a lot with Proctor and Gamble when I was with PWC. And uh the quote is uh all organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. And uh I I still use that quote, obviously, frequently today. And and here's the implications of it. Uh, as leaders, uh it tells us that we can understand the reasons we're getting the outcomes we get, right? Like the frustration is I don't understand why things don't work the way I want them to. I don't understand why it takes so long, I don't understand why it costs so much, I don't understand why it's not better, right? So, in understanding that organization design underpins performance, I can diagnose the cause and effect relationships between why things aren't working the way I want them to and what I need to do differently to make it better. So that's the one side. Concurrent with that, however, comes the responsibility for leadership to do something about it, right? By understanding that there are reasons behind it, and these reasons can be addressed. It's now my responsibility to address those reasons, create a different and better organization design that overcomes the problems I'm experiencing and gets the performance I desire to get.

Michael Hartmann 15:10

Yeah, it's funny. It reminded me of Bill Bill Parcells, the football coach, coached the Cowboys for like two seasons or whatever it was, and he I think he had something that was like um your your your um performance is you know in this case, right? Your standings, right? What your win-loss ratio was like is really who you are, right?

Joe Bockerstette 15:36

Yeah, you are what your record says you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Hartmann 15:38

I think that's it. Um so it's it's it's as like a parallel to that, right? I mean it's so what do you think about this? So um because I've seen this before where it's kind of obvious that there's problems within an organization. And I often I can coach some people personally you know who are struggling with how do I deal with this situation, and it becomes one where I go like either the leadership doesn't see the problem or they see it, but they either are uh they're afraid to address it, they don't know how to address it, they like but they just ignore it, right? Either like in both of those situations is bad.

Joe Bockerstette 17:43

It is, yeah. So uh we know from experience about 70% of all problems relate to process deficiencies, right? And from a leadership perspective, it really comes down to two sort of ideas. One is we accept the way it is is the way it is, right? Like there's nothing I can do about it. It is what it is, and I'm a victim of the system, and there's nothing I can do uh about that system. And then secondarily, I'm overwhelmed by the system and don't know how to get started, right? We have some great examples. I had a product development system example, very large CPG company. We were on the front end of scoping and planning, and we were there a couple of days, and the the head of product development says to me, You've done more to solve our problems in two days than we've been able to do in two years, right? Because it didn't have the template, the model to attack the problem. Like you look at it, you throw your hands up and say, I don't know what to do and I don't know where to begin, right? Well, that's our business model is attacking that sort of complicated, overwhelming, intimidating, large workflow that we can't wrap our arms around and rustle to the ground. So that's you know, we've been doing that for over 30 years now.

Michael Hartmann 19:03

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people get stuck in their can't they sort of the imagination of what should be possible. They've lost that muscle a little bit.

Joe Bockerstette 19:13

Right, right.

Michael Hartmann 19:14

Yeah. So one of the things that I've seen, I think probably people listening have seen too in market in marketing, is let's say you've got a process that you think is working smoothly, and then inevitably there's some sort of mistake, you know, a you know, bad launch, the email has mistakes in it. Um, and the the reaction from the organization is to just put in more rules, more reviews, more approvals, like all these kinds of things that I think um I get the the the instinct to have that kind of reaction, but to me that's usually made things worse instead of better. And sort of sort of be able to actually like is do you see the same thing and do you have anything open to try to avoid that?

Joe Bockerstette 19:58

Yeah, so we we do see that and a couple of implications of that. Number one, it slows everything down. Number two, it introduces as many errors as it fixes. Number three, ultimately, folks go around the system. I can't tell you how many clients we start work with where the final approval sits on the executive VP's desk, but the project's already gone, right? Like the VP's waiting to approve something that executed a week ago because nobody waits around for it anyway, right? And so it just introduces more reasons for things to go wrong, basically, in the flow, right? See, you know, we when you're designing for high performance, right? It begins with that primary purpose that we talked about at the end of the stream. What are we trying to accomplish? What are the deliverables that will facilitate accomplishing that? Now let's start with those, right? What are the specs on those deliverables? How are we performing against those specs? How will we measure how we're performing? Most of the improvement comes at that stage. Who's my customer? What do they want? What am I providing? What do I need to do differently? And let's go fix those problems. That's always a great place to start. In a marketing system, you're generally talking about uh 20 or less processes, even in the very large ones. And we've worked for some of the largest uh in the world. You're talking 20 or less processes, 20 or less processes are producing, you know, well under 50 primary deliverables, maybe even 25. So the the point is you can wrap your arms around this and really focus on doing the important things well.

Michael Hartmann 21:41

Would you say that number of deliverables? You mean the types of deliverables, not no, I mean types.

Joe Bockerstette 21:47

Yeah, a final report, a uh written uh blog, pages, yeah, a website page, right?

Michael Hartmann 21:55

Okay, maybe multiple of those are the I just wanted to sort of yeah, okay.

Joe Bockerstette 22:00

Right, but a type, yeah, that's fair, right?

Mapping Work With Process Playbooks

Michael Hartmann 22:02

Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's that makes sense. My dog agrees. Um she's helping. Um okay, so I'm curious, what um so one of the things that I because I've seen this before multiple times. Maybe maybe walk us through them a little more in the detail about your the the approach for mapping. And one of the one of the struggles I find is when you get this, whether it's an overreaction or I walk into a place where it's already got this like highly structured, lots of approval levels that you're saying point somebody's expected to do to approve but doesn't basically never does. Like how do you get into things like defining the processes? Steps or tasks that go into it? Do you do anything like erasy? We don't measure it. Hold on a sec, how do you how do you do that? And then what have you found surprises people most when you go through that with them?

Joe Bockerstette 22:54

Yeah, so um when you let's just take a marketing group, let's say there are 10 processes, just to pick a smaller number, round number. We would produce what we call a process playbook for each of those 10, right? And we would identify a process owner and a process team to work with. Uh the process owner understands how the process operates today. The process team might be users, subject matter experts, whatever. Right? We will facilitate sessions. We generally work on uh remote at this point, Zoom or Teams. We'll facilitate sessions to uh map, document how the work is done today. We do it real time. We use Visio as the mapping tool. So just like this. Uh podcast, we would be mapping on the screen while we're facilitating the group, right? That takes about five hours over three sessions per process. So, and and we do this as a project. So 10 processes, we'd be putting in about 50 hours, getting the baselines built, right? We then take you to what we call a system alignment workshop where we bring all of those process owners together. This tends to be on site. We put all these flows up on posters and then we troubleshoot the disconnects, the misunderstandings, the uh duplications, the gaps, all of the issues around the larger flow. It starts with that target market, ends with that uh qualified lead and everything that's taking place in between. We then go into a series of analysis, right? We analyze the customer-supply relationship. Each of these processes has a customer. Who is that customer? What do they want? What are we providing? What do we need to do differently? What information is being used by that process? How does that process interact with technology, hardware, and software? What's the racy uh diagram? Who's responsible for what in that process? What are the red clouds? So we identify what we call red clouds when we map a process. Red clouds are the problems and opportunities getting in the way of what you're trying to accomplish, right? And uh the metrics, what metrics are we measuring or not measuring in that process? And so it's a very extensive analytical exercise once we've created and documented the process itself, ultimately yielding a process improvement plan per process of quick wins. Quick wins are red clouds that can be solved in 90 days without a budget request, right? The dumb low hanging fruit, right? So if you've got 10 processes, you're gonna have about 25 tasks per process, about 250 tasks. You're gonna have about 300 red clouds, about 150 of those are gonna be quick wins, right? So there's plenty to go work on right away. And then we do an overall system improvement plan that puts together a plan over the next year or two to improve the whole system with opportunities that are larger than just process level quick wins, right? And so, and we can do all that really well inside of a couple of months, like from the point you would start a first conversation to having an entire system fully mapped, implementation plans in place and starting to implement as well under 90 days.

Michael Hartmann 26:23

Um I'm curious about like one of the things that I've seen that I've diagnosed is uh like unclear roles responsibilities, specifically around review and approval. Specifically, you got it. Right. Yeah, and and then and then in particular, like having the same level of scrutiny um regardless of what the um whatever is being produced. So when do you think about that? Do you so and then with races, I've always struggled with getting a like some people trying to at such a high level that they are almost useless, and then you you know multiple people with the the same kind of role, racy role. Oh good, all good points.

Joe Bockerstette 27:08

Like what's the right level of detail and how do you how do you deal with the like this yeah uh so here's multiple levels of approval and yeah, so we do race the at the we do raise the at the task level, but let me uh let me broaden the question a little bit. One of the paradigm shifts for marketing that we often lay in place is marketing is a project management system, right? And it is a it is the management of campaigns or the management of client contracts, it's the access of a variety of content contributors and bits and pieces that contribute to that project or that campaign, but ultimately it's the overarching management of work through a flow of uh a requirement that gets fulfilled, right? And we're often putting in place uh review systems, milestones, right, uh uh stage gates, uh elements of uh commonality and uh logical review to sort of take out the unclarity of who's responsible for what when, right? I'm just to make it up. We may have a one-month stage, let's say it's a nine-month relationship, just to pick some sort of time frame. We may have monthly review cycles that include what deliverables are being reviewed by that month, who's in the meeting, if you will, who's responsible for approval and what's the criteria for approval, right? So that you formalize that in a way that is very clear who's doing what when based on what criteria, right? Uh as you mentioned, every time we walk into a marketing group, uh roles and responsibilities are unclear, without question. And largely because the work is not organized into project thinking or campaign thinking. It's sort of disjointed work all being uh sort of thrown out there to be picked up and moved along as uh available, if you will, not driven by calendars and driven by sequencing and driven by uh approvals and responsibilities.

Michael Hartmann 29:29

I think you just you said something that really caught my attention there, because I I love the idea of being clear about who can approve versus who has input and there it's not.

Joe Bockerstette 29:39

Precisely and what's the criteria, right?

Michael Hartmann 29:41

What's the past what's the past fail, right? I had not really, I mean, I probably intuitively thought about it, but like we asked what what constitutes something that can be approved or not? Um and what's the timeline and what happens if that person like if there's somebody who's expected to review and approve and it's the time window, like what do we do? Like those kinds of times I think need to be clearly stated. Um and and I I I mean what I found is that two two things most commonly happen, right? One it's really unclear. So you got instead of a approver, you've got three or four people who all have veto power, right? Right. So things go through exactly just rounds, you don't know if they have conflicting feedback, and then you really screwed because it's right.

Joe Bockerstette 30:22

And then it sits in somebody's inbox for two weeks because they didn't get to it, and you know, yeah.

Michael Hartmann 30:28

And then um people get and then the other on the flip side is people get crushed for a mistake or something that is considered a mistake. And some of it's some of it's objectively a mistake, put the wrong date for the webinar, right? Time around time for work. Some of it is subjective mistake.

Joe Bockerstette 30:45

Interpretation.

Michael Hartmann 30:46

Yeah, I didn't like the way that this looked or who went to and they get killed for it. So the they get that reaction like, oh now we need even more review approval. Right.

Joe Bockerstette 30:56

See, the point is if you intentionally design these sort of big elements on the front end, it makes it easier to run the system, right? And if I know what deliverable specs are, if I know what go no go means, if I know who's approving it at what point, just to use that example, then I can operate the system in a standard repeatable way, right?

Michael Hartmann 31:18

Yeah. No, I I think I think that's great. And it's that's a but I I'm a true I'm a huge believer that what you need to do is have a lot of that in place. I the struggle I'm having with what you described is it sounds um that level of detail on that kind of stuff is to some degree sounds onerous, like it's almost a burden. Um, whereas but but it could be that my perspective. So the way I like to think about these, like I'm a big fan of having processes defined and things like that, right? But I want them to be defined at a level that allows for this essentially more like guardrail, unless unless it has to be explicit, like you must do this, right? Yeah, there's very few things where that's the case, right? Right. Um but statement guardrails and letting people interpret it and move things along. Right.

Joe Bockerstette 32:05

So you got it. So let me explain, right? So uh our process maps are at the task level, right? So it identifies the steps in the process, if you will. How that task gets accomplished is not defined unless you want it to be defined through a task instruction. So the opportunities, just take graphics, for instance, a sort of a creative area. There can be a task called design, right? And then your six graphic artists can design in their own sort of creative way, fulfilling that task. Now, there may be tasks where you want specific instructions uh defined, right? Like a lab test just to pick something that's different, right? So it's all available. It can be as flexible or as thorough as you want it to be. But what you definitely want is you want to understand the processes inside that system, what the primary deliverables are for each of those processes, and what steps are required in what sequence to make those deliverables happen.

Michael Hartmann 33:11

I the other thing that you said that was interesting, you said it multiple times in our conversation already, is describing marketing as a project management function, which is interesting because so our audience being marketing ops folks are probably nodding their heads going, yeah, well, that's flipped you. Um and in fact, if Mike was here, my co-host Mike Rizzo, he he has been advocating for a view of marketing ops specifics of you know the technology and execution of being almost like keep being treated like a product management function. Yeah. Does that make sense too?

Joe Bockerstette 33:50

Yeah, yeah. It is the execution. I always use the term campaigns, you could as a marketing term, but you can call us is the execution of an intention, right? And there are a series of steps and deliverables to execute that intention, right? We've worked very, very large public company in marketing ops where they were executing email and phone campaigns, right? And every little digit was essential if you screw one thing up and the whole, you know, thousands of people get the wrong thing, right? And so it is the execution of projects, right, with specific requirements and very, very tight tolerances in that case. And you gotta have a scripted process flow and an understanding of the guardrails in order to make that successful.

Michael Hartmann 34:42

Gotcha. So you mentioned that term red clouds, and I like that interesting. Yeah, it's it's very visual, right? So it makes sense. Right. Um so if you think about the work you've done with marketing teams, if you think about it from an ops lens, ops and technology, um, what are some of the common things that you see in where opportunities are identified within that space that you would call red clouds?

Joe Bockerstette 35:11

Uh yeah, so really across industry, across even functional, the red clouds tend to be pretty common, right? Undefined process would be number one. Uh process variation. Uh, most clients I work with have multiple departments or locations where different people do the same things different ways, right? Very, very common in the work we do. Undefined deliverables, that customer-supply relationship. Who's the customer? What do they want? What are we providing? Are we getting it right or not? Unmanaged data. It starts out inadequate on the front and just gets pushed through the whole system till it crashes at the back. Very, very common, right? Uh, missing uh performance uh metrics, right? We're not measuring our performance. Our org structure is out of sync with our workflow. We've got really goofy responsibilities. The implication of all this is you can't hold people accountable, right? If you don't have the foundational elements in place, then the idea that I'm gonna hold you accountable for your work is a little silly because so much of it's out of your control. What are you gonna do about it, right? Um let's see. Uh lack of clarity and roles and responsibilities, very, very common. It's where it comes with that misaligned org structure issue. Um you can find uh inadequate uh information system matchup, right? A system doesn't match to the real needs of that business, right? And so you've got a uh, you know, one of my favorite stories, we worked with a bank where over uh 50% of all their tasks were either Outlook, Word, or Excel, right? So what that tells you is they spend all their time working around their ERP system, right? Because it wasn't a good fit for what they were doing, right? So um you get this sort of uh automation can enable or hinder what you're trying to accomplish.

Michael Hartmann 37:17

Right.

A Simple Starting Point For Small Teams

Joe Bockerstette 37:18

I always find it hinders more than any well, it just makes it accelerates bad processes, right? It just it it makes it yeah, you know, a good process makes it easy to do the right thing, right? Uh a bad process makes it difficult to do the right thing, and we see far more of those than good ones.

Michael Hartmann 37:37

Okay, so I might go back to my reaction to this as being feeling a little bit um overwhelming or um burdensome because I think a lot of the people who are listening to our our podcast are at smaller firms, right? Even gross startups, things like that. How and it couldn't bring you know forward miss maybe they bring in consultants for this, and how would you advise their what how would you suggest they start if they said oh yeah, we need to we need to be better about having clear roles of responsibilities and understanding our process. So it was a yada yada yada. So how how would you guide them to if you need to go do what's the first thing to do in the second thing?

Joe Bockerstette 38:18

Yeah, so um I I would say this the first thing to do is, and we're talking about marketing, let's say specifically marketing, the first thing to do is let's identify the primary purpose of what we're trying to accomplish with our system, right? Whether it's brand awareness, whether it's lead generation, you know, marketing and sales often get sort of uh scrunched together today. So it can be um a sale, right? If you put marketing and sales together through an online strategy, for instance, it can all be uh put together. But the point is, what are we trying to accomplish? What deliverables are we producing inside this system today to accomplish it? What shape do we think they're in? Where are things going wrong? What processes would need to exist in order to do this well? And sort of where do we stand? What's our landscape relative to that intention? And then lastly, look at that organization structure. I see so many organizations where people are responsible for stuff because that person's a hero and we know we can throw more on them and they'll do a great job, and things get cobbled up, right? You want your organization structure to perfectly align with your workflow so that you can manage it well, right? If you don't have somebody responsible for uh, let me just pick an example, client data, which is something we find in bad shape almost everywhere we go. Well, if nobody is responsible for the client data setup, let's say it's being done in six different locations by six different people, what do you expect? It's gonna be bad. Right. And so you're aligning all of those elements into what do I intentionally want to accomplish and where do I stand today relative to that intention?

Michael Hartmann 40:19

So um maybe this is so one of the things that I have done in leadership roles and I coach people on is because they're trying to understand the capacity of the team and who's got what you know, watching out for where like we've got a single point of failure, for example. Right is like literally like it feels like this could have been a step towards what you're describing. Like I'll make a list, like these are the types of tasks my team is responsible for. And then here's yeah, here's the team across the top of you know, we'll make it to the matrix. And like who's who's the primary person or primary couple of people who are secondary? Uh, because it usually what it reveals is there's gaps, right? Tasks were expected, and we don't have somebody currently who is the primary person for that or secondary at all. And so it helps it helped me kind of go like, okay, where do we have gaps, right? So if I it helped me fight for budget for headcount, for example, which is exactly or or reorganize. Yeah, but more importantly, it was hey, like what are we not able to do today without you know, potentially burning people out because they're just getting crazy with something and um and then making sure that people could take time off, right? Because there was somebody who could back them up, even if that was me. Yeah. So is that a step like a part of what you're talking about?

Joe Bockerstette 41:39

It is, right? So you would call that a system skills matrix, right? And you would be matching up the available resources with the content of the work itself, right? Uh very, very common, uh, and typically run out of HR, right? But you know, it varies greatly.

Michael Hartmann 41:59

I don't think they understand the domain well enough to be able to do that. I wouldn't yeah. I mean, I've worked so with some good HR partners, but I don't know that they would know it deeply.

Joe Bockerstette 42:09

Yeah, but remember HR is responsible for more than, right? So they've got that same sort of challenge across the whole enterprise. But yes.

Michael Hartmann 42:21

Yeah, I I mean it's not to dismiss their help. Um I get it. I wouldn't I wouldn't expect them to be to do that. Like that to see that's like that's part of their job of being a leader is to anticipate that and do that. Um interesting. Okay. Um this is maybe fairly tactical, but when you guys do the process mapping piece, uh is there a particular format to use? Do you do you know you say Vizio, so flow diagrams use swim lane stuff? Do you do we we do not?

Joe Bockerstette 43:00

So we use a uh method we called Paragon. So Paragon is our name for what we do. Uh P E R I G O N, which is a 360-degree view of an object, right? We uh we use Vizio with a Paragon library of uh templates, tools, icons, stencils, like it's our own language. Our map is a vertical map, uh, very easy to train, very logical to follow, uh, and it stood the test of time for 30 something years now. It's amazing to me. It was invented by an electrical engineer who used schematic methodologies for workflow, right? So it's very, very sound. We're the only ones in the world that do it the way we do it. Uh and it's more detailed, more thorough, and more uh illustrative than other maps, much easier to follow. And then for the backside of the playbook, we use Excel because everybody can use Excel. And our our method is based on the idea. It's not that hard to figure out what's wrong. You just got to ask the people doing the work. Like there's plenty to work on when you ask somebody, why does just order entry not work? Yeah, exactly. Right? Like, why does why does order entry not work? Well, oh my God, I can't believe nobody's already, you know, and and it just starts uh spewing. And so we have no problem figuring out the cause and effect relationships between why things are going wrong and where, right? And so you're producing a playbook per process and tends to be 30 to 50 pages, although it's digital, uh, and uh it's uh easily updatable, right? It's it's also easily transferred. Like we'll train clients to do what we do. Uh and our goal in general is to start the early work, get the ball rolling, and turn it over to an internal client team to take it and run with it.

Scaling With Standards Then Automation

Michael Hartmann 45:02

Got it. All right. Well, let me let me rent like one more question, then we'll wrap up. So I'm curious. So maybe tied to the people I talked about who are in like growth companies. So part of this is going to be a challenge like going from where they are and then they need to scale over time.

Joe Bockerstette 45:19

Yes.

Michael Hartmann 45:19

How how what are what are signals they could be looking for when it's tough to rethink the system versus just sort of throw more bodies at it or power through it?

Joe Bockerstette 45:28

Yeah, that is a great question. The majority of the work we do in all business systems is that, right? We are growing rapidly and we've got to do something. So a couple of signs would be we're fracturing today. Let's say we're on a Large growth path, and our people are stressed and overworked, and we're seeing some busts in the system, and we're really at our limit. And so I'm faced with I'm going to say doubling by next year just to pick a big number. And if I don't change anything, that means I've got to add 50 people or 100 people. And it doesn't make sense to me, right, that I've got to double my workforce to double my volume, just to again pick a number. There's got to be a way to scale that I can implement to prevent the need for me to, like, you know, I can't absorb 100 people next year just to pick that number, right? I've got to find a way to get the work done without that. And so that really triggers the idea we've got to look at process. And so we've got to understand our process, we've got to standardize our process, then we've got to automate our process in a way that allows us to super scale without adding a bunch of people.

Michael Hartmann 46:47

Yeah. That's it. It reminds me of a project I did years ago at a big semiconductor company where I was asked to go figure out how can we how can we enable technical support to support more customers as revenue is growing at a certain pace without because historically it grown at the same pace and they wanted to capture more of the profit from that, right? So they've like venture curve, if you will.

Joe Bockerstette 47:11

Yeah, the one other point to add on that is if you just throw software on top of that without really understanding the system and the requirements and what your business model is, it just makes a mess. And it ends up being more of an inhibitor than an enabler, right? Because I don't put the right switches on, I don't make the right decisions about A, B, or C, and end up with something that uh really makes it difficult to do the right thing.

How To Reach Joe And Closing

Michael Hartmann 47:37

Yeah. No, it's interesting. It's kind of going back to my uh the roots of my early, early consulting career doing process. It's a fun business. Yeah, it's um, you know, to some degree, these like these are it feels like a little bit of fundamentals, but it's good to see that there's like a little more structure for it. Yeah, Joe, been a been a pleasure talking to you. If folks want to if they're interested in continuing the conversation or just want to learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Joe Bockerstette 48:04

Yeah, so it's www.businessmapping.com and my email is Joe at businessmapping.com. Just feel free to reach out. It's been a pleasure.

Michael Hartmann 48:12

All right, good. Well, I appreciate it. Again, Joe, thank you. Thanks to our audience out there for continuing to support us. We appreciate it. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest like Joe, please reach out and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye, everybody.