Do more with less: Selecting the right business methodology

Introduction

The impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on business around the world cannot be understated.

In just a few short months, workplaces and work culture around the world has changed more than it has in a generation.

All of a sudden, concepts like "remote working", "flexible teams", "home offices" and more entered the general business ecosystem in a big way.

A growing theme has been finding alternative solutions to make sure organizations stay leaner so they can operate with faster speeds and more agility, changing as needed based on market fluctuations both in terms of supply and demand.

In particular, this pandemic has been an immense challenge for company management as new paradigms and methodologies are required to create effective, united and productive teams that are not only able to continue business-as-normal but able to thrive in a post-Covid world.

This report aims to highlight 3 key business methodologies and introduce the practices and implementations so that business leaders can transition their teams into a more fluid form during the current climate while increasing productivity on every level.

Parkinson's Law

In the year 1955, a British historian named Cyril Northcote Parkinson contributed a piece in The Economist after serving much of his life in the British Civil Service department. The first sentence of that piece now lives on in infamy: "Work Expands so as to fill its time available for completion."

To simplify, basically any type of work will take up as much time as you will allow for it. This simple law explains why often a project takes two weeks if you set the deadline two weeks from now, when in reality you could have completed it in 4 or even 5 days. It is easy to imagine how this drastically affects multiple areas at work, ranging from tasks that have firm deadlines to simple meetings.

Everybody has experienced that feeling when you’re paralyzed and incapable of working, and then suddenly you become a machine in the final week before a task has to be done.

It forces you to ask yourself whether or not a 60 minute meeting really takes 60 minutes, or whether or not you can achieve the same amount of productivity in 40, or even 30 minutes instead.

Understanding this concept is key for managers to effectively decide deadlines and proper resource allocation.

Kanban Boards

Unlike Parkinson's Law, Kanban is a much more visual type of methodology that aims to simplify processes and forces teams to break things down to its simplest form in order to move things along.

While it has been adopted heavily by the manufacturing and IT sectors, Kanban has slowly grown to be much more applicable for other industries as well — making it an excellent tool for teams of any function. At it's core, Kanban helps leaders understand where bottlenecks in a process are systemically, so that they can be fixed.

It is a powerful tool that is customizable based on your team's need, as it can be a simple 3x3 grid, or it can be expanded to be much more in-depth based on what processes you are trying to make more efficient. The visual aspects of Kanban are also highly valuable because everyone can physically see the process, which acts as a powerful positive reinforcement when things are going smooth.

The Agile Method

This is deeply entrenched in the IT and software development sectors since the early 2000's2. There are many excellent case studies of how teams have implement an agile method over the last two decades, but just like Kanban it is slowly but surely growing out of the IT shadow to be implemented by teams of various functions.

In a world where much is in chaos, agile methodology is more valuable than ever since it preaches frequent delivery of products in addition to rapid testing to see what does and does not work. This type of method is perfect as the global economy and its consumers come out of the Covid-19 slump without anyone really knowing how things will turn out.

By implementing an agile methodology for your business practices, you are making sure that at the very least your team is constantly reiterating and testing out new methods as agile as possible without over committing to an idea or product.

Moving Forward

No matter which methodology is best suited for your organization, or whether you use all three, Lark can be a powerful tool to systemically organize the transition and increase the productivity of team members even when they are remote. For starters, Agile methodology requires intense communication and documentation since change is often rapid and constant. Lark's central messenger hub makes this much simpler, as it comes with a chat history available even for new members so that they can access the entire history of the chat and be caught up

For Parkinson's Law, we recommend leaders to isolate key areas of lag within their business units. Perhaps it's a payment process, or the first drafts for design teams. The clearer the problem the simpler it will be to implement Parkinson's Law. A good way to identify where the problem lies is by using the Kanban method actually, as once you've identified a bottleneck within your chain of operation, you can then implement Parkinson's Law to reduce the time.

An example could be for a finance team that struggles with paying out vendors in time. If the team lays out all the tiles on a Kanban board using the pull method, you will quickly identify that a potential lag in the system lies within the documentation of accounting. Using this hypothetical example, we can assume that by giving the accounting team 48 hours to document all accounts payable is causing a bottleneck further up the chain. A next possible step would be implementing Parkinson's Law and testing out the change to a 24 hour limit, instead of 48. You could even take this one step further by leaning into Agile methodology and involving all stakeholders involved in this process.

Kanban boards really come in handy on modern video conferencing tools like the one bundled for free in Lark Suite. It's highly visual method of displaying information leaves little room for confusion and when working remotely, allows people to get up to speed in no time.

Conclusion

As business leaders, you know that the only constant is change and in order to empower and inspire the people under you, embracing that change is paramount.

Whether than change stems from adopting one of the methodologies above or from one of the dozens across the ecosystem, the process differs from business to business.

At the end of the day, the changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic won't fully manifest for years, even decades to come. One thing is for certain though, the business landscape has changed and thing will probably never go back to exactly how it was.