10 Questions to Ask When You Design or Redesign a Process

Toni owned a successful commercial insurance brokerage focusing on clients with 250-500 employees.  She was the lead sales person for her firm, with a support staff to back her up.  Recognizing that anything that helped give her more sales time would help her company grow, Toni instituted “Project Toni”, a dedicated company-wide effort to incrementally replace her from all renewal processes (one of the core functions of her firm and one that sucked up months of her time).

She knew that in order to do this she would need to refine her company’s core renewal systems so that her team, working with the company systems, didn’t miss anything.

Here are 10 questions you can use to help you redesign and upgrade your internal company systems.

1. How can we reduce the steps in this process?
2. How can we combine steps to make it simpler to follow?
3. Can we repurpose an existing system or tool to save us time or give us a better result?
4. How can we speed up this process or any step within this process?
5. How can we automate this process (or any part of this process)?
6. How can we semi-automate this process (or any part of this process)?
7. How can we template this process (or any part of this process)?
8. How can we lower the costs of doing this process without impacting the value of the output?
9. What simple changes or improvements can we make to increase the value of the output?
10. Who else in the world has a related process or tool we can learn from to help us better design this process?