A couple weeks ago I had the good fortune to join a Process Streamlining team, assembled to revise a system in use by the HR department at UBC. I found the “process” of process streamlining itself to be a valuable learning excercise, so I thought I’d share some of those insights here.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of process streamlining, you might want to read some background information first. Try Googling “process streamlining” and, as of the time of writing, you should see a link from UBC HR at the top: Process Streamlining – UBC Human Resources [sidenote: I'm proud to say that I had a hand in getting this top ranking!].

From the UBC HR website, process streamlining is:

“…a structured methodology involving a step-by-step approach, resulting in bottom-line success for your clients and staff.”

The ultimate goal of a process streamlining project is to produce recommendations for how to improve a process, where the improvements can be made within a set time window, usually about 3 months.

In our project we were taking a look at a registration process for a series of professional development courses from Organizational Development & Learning (ODL) at UBC. We followed the methodology pretty closely adopting the roles, timeframes, and expectations as outlined in Process Streamlining – UBC Human Resources.

The general idea is to take a relatively small group of people who each come from a different perspective to the process, methodically build rapport and a team dynamic, and step through a careful sequence of brainstorming sessions. It doesn’t take much in the way of materials. At the very basic level, all you really need are:

• poster paper
• sticky notes
• markers
• tape

Some nice touches, especially for documenting and reporting, are:

• a laptop (ideally with Visio or OmniGraffle)
• a projector

BUT, the most important ingredient in my mind is:

• good people

Anytime you take a group of people and throw them into a room to throw ideas around, poke/prod/probe to pull out details from people’s thoughts, and do this all within defined timeframes and in the close confines of a single room, you can never overlook the importance of selecting the right people for this task – and luckily we had a great mix of personalities and background experiences.

Another key ingredient is an experienced group/team facilitator who has a bag of tricks for keeping discussions moving along at a productive pace. Here are some of those tools:

Time Boxing
Time boxing is a strategy you can use to keep the team from stagnating or getting fixated on one topic or one line of discussion.

Have you ever been in a meeting where it feels like the discussion is dragging on or people are getting off topic, straying off on tangents that don’t really speak to your goals in the meeting?

With Time Boxing you set a pre-defined amount of time to talk about one idea or one set of ideas. When the time is up, you move on.

Time Boxing acknowledges that there may be more ideas than you get to talk about, but that every discussion has to stay in focus within the larger context of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Parking Lot
The Parking Lot fits in well when you’re using a strategy like time boxing where there may be a handful of great ideas that deserve some more attention, but which are either slightly off-topic or out of scope for your current goals.

When you come up with ideas that don’t fit within the current discussion, or you come up with ideas that are outside the scope of your project, you throw them in the “parking lot” – which is essentially a sheet of poster paper where you write down these ideas.

The Parking Lot is always there for people to look at, but it also there with the recorded information so that people can forget about it until a later time.

Meta-Awareness
There is another term for this, but I can’t remember it right now, so for the time being I’m calling it “meta-awareness”.

What this refers to is the ability for people in the team, particularly the team facilitator, to have an awareness of the communication dynamics that are happening with the team.

It’s more than hearing what people are saying (including yourself), it also involves “hearing” the underlying messages and articulating how messages are being perceived by the people involved in the discussion.

A sign of this awareness is the use of words like:

• “What I’m hearing you say is that…”
• “I may not quite have this right, but to me it sounds like…”
• “I appreciate where you’re coming from on this, but just to play devil’s advocate, what if…”
• “I think you’re onto something here. What do you think about…”

Humour
This is one of the subtleties that can be a very fine line to balance. The right use of humour can help diffuse potentially difficult situations like scenarios where team members have to confront one another on some issue.

Some good situations to use humour are when:

• people are going off-topic
• you get the sense that someone is feeling unfairly criticized
• you feel like someone’s idea is being shot down without it’s fair air-time
• etc…

Every situation warrants its own level of discretion, but humour can be a great way to ease tension in a group.

There is a lot more I could write, but I’ll leave it at those core ingredients for now.