This is the question you need to ask yourself and your staff in Q4 this year. On December 1st, 1913, Ford created the first assembly line and built a huge empire on repeating tasks and improving each step along the way with continuous review. Today’s growth doesn’t primarily come from a better assembly line, but rather from better process and better team communication. Our tools have changed but the assembly line process is fundamentally the same concept.
One of the many keys to growth is defining process and procedure within each division of your team, getting everyone on the literal same page. In order for this to work, you’ll need a few things to line up properly:
- Identify and deploy an easy-to-use centralized documentation platform. There are several of these, from SharePoint to Atlassian Confluence to custom Wikis, so make sure you set up the right system for your team’s needs.
- Engage at least one documentation “champion” on each team to make sure you have someone on each team who is actually interested in sharing this important tribal knowledge with other team members. You can incentive these folks by reminding them that they’ll be more broadly considered experts in their fields for writing, and also encouraging feedback, which brings us to an important third point…
- Review, edit, comment and ask questions! Engage the team to make sure that what is written is actually what you want to do. The more participation, the better.
Used in connection with technologies like chat, video conference, Single Sign On and remote access, you can bring the entire team together around a common goal and set specific objectives on how to get there. Document, perform, refine, repeat and make that economy of scale a real thing for your team!