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Chad Prinkey is CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting, a Baltimore-based firm that provides strategic consulting, facilitation services and peer-to-peer panel discussions for construction executives. The opinions are the author’s own.
We’ve all heard it: trust the process.
Much of our work with our construction clients involves developing and implementing processes across all facets of their business. The benefits of using well-documented and thoroughly trained processes are hard to overstate.
Chad Prinkey
Permission granted by Well Built Construction Consulting
Consistently adopted processes not only lead to positive results, but there is also a significant increase in the speed of new hire productivity. When a new hire is given a comprehensive playbook for their role, trained in that playbook, and the company follows up to make sure people are using it, new hires become successful quickly.
Another benefit is that when everyone knows the process and follows it, veteran employees are freed up to focus on growth. It’s exciting stuff.
Avoid stiffness
That said, don’t make the mistake of completely swapping a culture of individual decision-making and situational flexibility for one of rigidity and compliance. When the situation calls for it, deviations from the process are not only acceptable. They are necessary and preferred.
For example, we often implement a structured go/no-go criteria with our construction clients to help decide which projects should invest their extremely valuable and limited pre-construction resources.
This process, which should be fully customized for their unique businesses and regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current and future business conditions, helps contractors spend time on the healthiest opportunities available.
The process also saves time by skipping projects that don’t fit and using that time for more comprehensive preconstruction efforts on target projects. The result is almost always higher capture rates at project completion and better margins at the time of sale.
Once this process is established, it should be used consistently to provide an objective and dispassionate scorecard for the project you are invited to undertake. The scorecard is there to help businesses make decisions.
Note that I did not say that the process makes the decision for them.
It should be up to the judgment of intelligent and experienced people in the business to determine whether they will pursue a particular project. So when the scorecard says a project isn’t a good fit, that negative against the job should be considered an extremely valid data point in a go/no-go decision. However, I still encourage companies to make what they feel is the right judgment for their company on each project, regardless of the scoreboard output.
Imagine a situation where a project didn’t achieve go status according to the scorecard, but this project was the first opportunity to deliver a project with a high-value client. The project is a little too small to be considered target work, the competitive circumstances are not ideal, and the project is not in the preferred geographic footprint.
When the theoretical CEO of this company calls me to ask if I should follow the process or listen to his judgment to bid for the job, I respond by saying that it sounds like you have compelling strategic reasons to deviate from your process in this case…go for it!
Strategy over process
In other words, strategy beats process every time.
Deviations from your established processes have value. Whether you have strategic business reasons for a deviation, or you just want to experiment with a different approach, there is absolutely nothing wrong with consciously deviating from the process.
But “consciously” is the key term here. It is essential that the leadership knows the reason for the deviation, as well as the recognition of the risks associated with not following the standard. When deviations go well, we often make new discoveries that allow us to improve our processes. However, if a deviation produces a negative outcome, rather than blame, it can be a powerful lesson that reinforces the importance of following our processes.
It is a leader’s job to walk the line between strategy and process, between rigidity and opportunism.
Document, train and actively monitor effective processes in all facets of your business for all the reasons listed above and more. Just don’t allow your processes to create rigidity that prevents good judgment, creativity, and intuition in executive decision-making.
