The COVID-19 pandemic has consumed our time and energy for half a year. Many organizations say it’s time to refocus, to both take care of now and build for the future. These philanthropic organizations are moving from being reactive to transformative to ensure they achieve their mission. How will organizations that are already working at capacity effectively take on their future? One tool to build that capacity is process transformation.
The Challenge: Creating the Capacity for Today and Tomorrow
Due to the pandemic, grantmaking organizations have been in reactive mode, setting up safe, remote work environments in order to continue daily operations. This has required all hands-on deck, with employees being heroes by working creatively and for long hours. Recently one foundation shared that at times employees work while sitting in their cars in front of each others’ houses, ready to hand off grant checks or paperwork to the next person for the next step.
Yet even with this all-consuming workload, philanthropic leaders are focusing on increasing their organizations’ community impact. These leaders tell me they are now attempting to step back to assess where they are in their mission while maintaining safe operations.
This is a challenging next step, as capacity is already tight. The typical work of assessing existing programs and making adjustments places a huge strain on resources in today’s already at-capacity environment.
Capacity, or the hours available to do work, is a tricky asset to manage. In my process training, I talk through this capacity constraint.
Each employee has about 2,000 hours of work capacity in a year. The tasks they perform use up that capacity. This work can add value to the community, such as issuing grants to qualified organizations. Or it can be squandered through wasted steps that add no value to the community, including rework or duplication. Each organization’s yearly capacity is based on the number of full-time people times about 2,000 hours. It is up to the organization to decide how that capacity is spent or invested.
When I coach teams, we measure their value-added and wasted steps. I find wasted steps account for between 40% and 70% of work. For example, creating grants takes many tasks for thousands of work hours to deliver the grant check to the qualified organization. Yet this process can contain rework and duplication, resulting in a waste of work hours that could be better used to serve the organization’s central mission.
Process improvement is a generic term that hints at the opportunity to improve efficiency. But process transformation—a higher level of process improvement training—builds employees’ ability to see the wasted steps and eliminate them. After receiving my team’s process transformation training, one leader said: “I just need to find these wasted steps, then solve them to get back capacity for the rest of my career.” And she did. She and her operations team took their intake for home ownership coaching processes from an average of 90 days to between 9 and 20 days. They found the capacity to deliver more, better, and faster services to their community.
Next Step: Get information on Increasing Capacity through Process Transformation
Even as grantmaking organizations struggle to get work done from their remote desks, untapped capacity is just waiting to be found. As organizations are completing this year’s work and planning for next year, including process transformation training and coaching in plans is a first step to recapturing lost or wasted capacity. With an investment in our process transformation training and coaching, organizations can recapture and reinvest $30,000 to $75,000 of labor annually. Learn more about what organizations are budgeting for in this companion blog post: This Year, Plan to Succeed!
Contact Lee Kuntz to share what you see at your organization and to learn more about how your organization can thrive during these challenging times. Other organizations are moving forward during these difficult times, your organization can too.
Is your foundation installing new grantmaking or CRM software? Many times, staff are excited to have a new system, but they are hesitant to give up what is familiar and proven. Some philanthropic organizations address these emotions by developing a comprehensive software install plan. Such a plan addresses process change management steps as well as the questions, concerns, and reservations of the people who will implement them. Leaders who took these human factors into account say their investment in thorough planning more than paid off.
More than one hundred philanthropic organizations change grantmaking systems each year. This once-in-a-decade or so task is an expensive and risky venture. Given that most foundations install a new system quite infrequently, employees are understandably unfamiliar with the conversion process. And even though some employees may be tired of the old software, are they ready to significantly change their work processes, roles, and controls to maximize the new system?
One foundation spent a couple million dollars on a new grantmaking system and CRM only to have employees bypass the labor-saving features of the new system. They continued their manual work arounds, including old work steps, spreadsheets, and piles of paper. All the expensive, state-of-the-art bells and whistles that the new system offered went unused.
Achieving buy-in from staff members who will use the new system on a daily basis is a huge contributor to software success. Therefore, meeting employees where they are and readying them to implement the changes ahead is an important project step. Recently we surveyed philanthropic leaders, asking what steps they included in their new software plan to prepare employees for the pending conversion. More than half (58%) of survey respondents said they invested in human and process change management training during their new system install.
Their outcomes? Participants said their training addressed human change-management skills, empowering employees to question how work is done, business policies, and roles and responsibilities. Many also said they believed this training helped them achieve improved outcomes during the new software install and ongoing.
Is your philanthropic organization interested in learning how human and process change management training looks? Register for this upcoming free webinar: Not Just Plug and Play – Process, People and New System Install.
Also, contact Lee Kuntz to discuss your journey and challenges. Lee can share how others who have installed new software have achieved success by incorporating both human and process change management training into their installation plan. Many foundations have helped their employees embrace new and better ways to approach their daily tasks using a new software system You can too!
Have you installed new software that was universally embraced and paid for itself quickly, perhaps even within 24 months?
Attaining widespread employee buy-in at an affordable price is a worthy but difficult goal. Yet as new software competes for funding with other good ideas, achieving this is important. Business process redesign can help philanthropic organizations realize this measure of success.
Philanthropic organizations replace software, including their big grantmaking systems, every five to twenty years. That makes sense, as the philanthropic industry is growing. Contributions to donor-advised funds totaled $37.12 billion in 2018. This represents an 86 percent increase in contributions over the past five years. The related grants increased likewise.
Growth in grantmaking often necessitates employing new tools to stay ahead of the workload. Leaders of philanthropic organizations need to build a strong case to justify investment in costly new software. The best-case scenario is when the new software pays for itself within 12 to 24 months. In order to achieve such a favorable return on investment, employees throughout the organization need to be open to change and willing to explore all that the software has to offer. Business process redesign engages employees in fully learning and embracing new software, inviting them to fully leverage it.
Recently, three experienced technology leaders and I spoke at a Technology Association of Grantmakers webinar about how to leverage business process redesign to promote software acceptance and a quick return on investment. Key points:
Check out this new, free tool that can inform your thinking about software implementation: Business Process Redesign Steps for New Software Success.
Contact me, Lee Kuntz, at info@improveprocess.net for a no-cost discussion of your situation and recommended steps to redesign your business processes.
Foundations have realized substantial benefits from their new software investment through leveraging our business process transformation coaching and training. You can too!
Contact Lee today to discuss your challenge.
