Chad Prinkey is CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting, a Baltimore-based firm that delivers strategic consulting, facilitation services and peer roundtables for construction executives. Opinions are the author’s own.
We’ve all heard it: Trust the process.
Much of our work with our construction clients involves process development and implementation around every facet of their business. The benefits of using well-documented and thoroughly trained processes are hard to overstate.
Not only do uniformly adopted processes consistently lead to positive results, there's also a significant increase in the velocity of new hire productivity. When a new hire is handed a comprehensive playbook for their role, trained on that playbook and the company follows up to make sure people use the playbook, new hires succeed quickly.
Another plus is that when everyone knows the process and follows it, veteran employees are freed up to focus on growth. That’s exciting stuff.
Avoid rigidity
That said, don't make the mistake of completely swapping out a culture of individual decision-making and situational flexibility with one of rigidity and compliance. When the situation calls for it, deviations from the process aren't just acceptable. They are necessary and preferred.
For example, we often implement a structured go/no-go criterion with our construction clients to help decide which projects they should invest their extremely valuable and limited preconstruction resources on.
This process, which must be completely customized to their unique companies 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 on project pursuits and better margins at the time of sale.
Once this process is in place, it should be used consistently to provide a dispassionate, objective scorecard for the project you are invited to pursue. The scorecard is there to help companies make decisions.
Notice that I did not say the process makes the decision for them.
It should be up to the judgment of the smart, experienced people in the business to determine whether they will pursue a given project. Therefore, when the scorecard says that a project is a poor fit, that negative against taking 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 believe is the right judgment for their company on each project regardless of the scorecard output.
Imagine a situation in which a project failed to meet go status based on the scorecard, but this project was the first opportunity to pursue a project with a high-value client. The project is slightly too small to be considered a target job, the competitive circumstances are less than ideal and the project is not in the preferred geographic footprint.
When the theoretical CEO of this company calls me to ask if he should follow the process or listen to his judgment to bid the job, I respond by saying it sounds like you have compelling strategic reasons to deviate from your process on this one… go for it!
Strategy over process
In other words, strategy outweighs process every single time.
Deviations from your established processes have value. Whether you have strategic business reasons for a deviation, or you merely wish to experiment with another approach, there's absolutely nothing wrong with knowingly deviating from the process.
But “knowingly” is the key term here. It’s essential that leadership knows the why behind the deviation as well as acknowledgment of any 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 result, instead of casting blame, it can be a powerful lesson that reinforces the importance of following our processes.
It’s a leader’s job to walk the line between strategy and process, between rigidity and being opportunistic.
Please document, train and actively supervise effective processes in every facet of your business for all the reasons listed above and more. Just don't allow your processes to create a rigidity that gets in the way of sound judgment, creativity and intuition in executive decision-making.
