How to Design Scalable Workflows - 3 Crucial Aspects
If you intend to grow your economic endeavors, you need to think ahead and plan for the future.
No one benefits from bottlenecks and production caps, especially not emerging businesses. Growth should be the ultimate goal of every entrepreneur but, given enough growth, these entrepreneurs, however industrious or capable of seeing the big picture, are eventually going to encounter their limits.
What worked like a charm with 50 clients will come to a grinding halt when applied to 500. That effective but complicated solution will go with the expert who created it if they leave your workplace and you have not managed to streamline it.
Prevent these issues before you encounter them. Think bigger. Think into the future. This future is scalable workflows.
What exactly is a scalable workflow?
The idea is simple. A scalable workflow is one designed with expansion in mind. For any given input a scalable workflow will deliver a predictable and reliable output. The numbers change, the volume increases, but the process is the same with minimal adjustments.
Sounds too vague? Then ask yourself: is it going to work if you quadruple the traffic? Will the efficiency be the same if you replace some of your experts? If an error suddenly pops up, can you fix it quickly, or will the whole thing come crashing down?
If every answer is yes, congrats! You have a scalable workflow.
But what makes a workflow scalable? Let's dive in.
1. Automation
Automation lies at the heart of scalability and should be the number one priority to have in mind when planning for future growth.
It is superior in every way to the traditional, manual modes of business operation. Strive for automation whenever you can and avoid manual inputs as they are the sole source of errors, flaws, and inefficiencies in every workflow. Doing things manually is inferior to automation in every relevant business metric: it is much slower, quite more complex, and it requires menial work that can otherwise be spent on more important processes.
Needless to say, automation brings order into the workflow by providing much more visibility and control over the working parts and eliminates redundancy by maintaining a firm grasp over every junction and end of the operation.
Think of automation as giving the reins to a super-efficient overseer. You no longer have to think about the process, about potential mistakes, about the expertise of the person doing the task… You just give the input and get the expected output. No more, no less. Exactly.
Predictable, reliable, scalable. A match made in heaven!
2. Flexibility
While scalable workflows handle different factors, stressors, and changes in volume much better than traditional and manual systems, you still have a business sailing through the rough waters of the market. No system in existence is immune to change.
It thus comes in handy if you can make the change without having to pay for a whole IT department to implement it, doesn't it?
Try to use flexible solutions that do not need to be built from scratch whenever you decide to make a minor alteration – aim towards tools that can accommodate processes as they evolve instead.
Consider no-code as an ideal answer in this situation. These tools allow for powerful changes without requiring any coding skills whatsoever. With Skippet's natural language processing feature, for example, making the change is as easy as telling the software what to do - in English.
Simpler and more adequate, with reduced costs. Flexible is synonymous with scalable in this case!
3. Data Integration
Data is the single most valuable asset to every business today. It is crucial in everything from productivity metrics to marketing, so we tend to produce and store data on a massive scale.
Much of this data is duplicated, though, which is not only a waste of effort but a serious hazard as well. A CRM, accounting software, project management software, distribution system, and so on; it’s only a matter of time before something gets sent to someone from the wrong list.
Sometimes, a simple mistake. In other cases, a major disaster.
Having a single, unified source instead prevents this and makes even data an essential part of your scalable workflow.
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