Delivering on your Value Proposition
Delivering on Your Value Proposition
When we get to Marketing, we'll discuss your Value Proposition in detail. Your Value Proposition, simply put, is the way your business proposes to bring value to the market. Marketing focuses around the delivery of your value proposition to potential customers. When we get to Operations, we will drill down deeply into the particular activities that go on every day inside your business that make the delivery of your value proposition possible. Management is concerned with the strategies, action plans, measurement and improvement of those action plans, which make the delivery of your Value Proposition and the fulfillment of your strategic objectives possible.
Your Value Proposition flows from your Mission and your Vision. Once you have decided what is important to your business, and where it is going, your Value Proposition defines how it proposes to turn who you are and what you want to do into a way to create value for your customers. To that end, it's time to take a birds-eye view look at how work gets done in your company. We'll do this by creating a Business Process Map. The last thing you need as a business owner is another time-consuming project that produces a shiny piece of paper for you to file. The point of this exercise is to focus your understanding of how your business creates value, and it needs to be done in ten minutes or less. This is a very simple, high-level overview that should look something like the following.
Process Map
Below draw a very simple process map that illustrates how work gets done in your business.
Detailed Workflow
Of course, the simplistic Process Map that you just made does not do justice to the complex machine that is your business. Each department, section, team, function, group, or individual position will likely encompass a number of work processes. Don't get bogged down at this point by trying to outline every single way in which work gets done in your business. You don't need to spend your time outlining in detail the exact steps the weekend night janitor should take to mop the floors. What you may find useful is to sit with your department heads and together prepare a process map of how work gets done in their department. Use the opportunity to explain to them how they will sit with each of the individuals in their department and map out how work gets done in their positions. Depending on your time, and the relationships you have with your managers, it may be better to delegate process mapping to each of your department heads and have them come back to you with the maps for their departments. The goal is to compose the skeleton that will become the framework for your business systems, and to do it without it eating up your valuable time.
Have your managers do the same with their departments. Just a quick sketch of the way work gets done, is all that they need to provide. The idea is not to create a big project for them, but just to have them think it through. For a sales department, it might look something like this.
