
CFO Backed Tips for How to Systemise Your Business - Karlie_stephens
http://www.altusfinancial.com.au/latest-news-1/cfo-backed-tips-for-how-systemise-your-business
======
hga
I strongly suggest reading _The E Myth: Why Most Businesses Don 't Work and
What to Do About It_, ([https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Most-Businesses-Dont-
About/dp/08...](https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Most-Businesses-Dont-
About/dp/0887303625/)) or perhaps it's updated _The E-Myth Revisited..._
([https://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-
Abo...](https://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-
About/dp/0887307280/)).

Besides being fairly short, and having a lot of general good advice, such as,
to use my own wording, making sure every essential hat is worn by _someone_ ,
e.g. you probably won't start out with a CFO, but make sure one of the
founders or earliest employees wears it, it goes into a thesis that you should
write up a manual of how your business runs as if you were going to franchise
it.

Plenty of good justification for writing this up at _some_ level of detail can
be found in the other comments in this topic, although I'll admit the book is
not oriented toward high tech businesses.

But they're still businesses, and for that focus I highly recommend, probably
after one or more books on customer development, which refine many of the
ideas in it, _Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur 's
Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Walking-
High-Tech-High-Wire-Entrepren...](https://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-
High-Wire-Entrepreneurs/dp/0070004684/)). It's a story about a company that
made and sold novel at the time discrete semiconductor devices, how they did
their customer development, how they realized doing custom work for various
customers was a loser, etc. It'll help reify what you'll read in good customer
development books.

------
cagenut
Bureaucratic process-driven de-skilling probably made sense when you were GE
and had six-figure worth of boomers to coordinate physical goods
manufacturing. But today, for a company with 1 to even 4 figures worth of
people paid to think and decide, it doesn't even make sense let alone work.
The whole point of software, and computers, is that if something is that
systematizable _then have the systems do it_. Process that is not code is a
sloppy half assed anachronism. People are not machines, if the following the
process actually matters then don't leave it to a human error rate.

~~~
tzmudzin
... just don't be surprised if you suddenly no longer understand how your
systems work, and cannot change them. It's important to relate the advice to
the size of the company and the type of the market you're operating in.

\- Should startups with two-digit employee counts start doing this? Not
necessarily. Will the lack of documented policies, processes and procedures
stop them from growing at some point in time? Definitely.

\- Will this help you in a boutique business delivering highly individual
solutions? Possibly, bot not necessarily. Will it help serve a massive
customer base and use efficiencies of scale? Definitely.

There's definitely a difference between bureaucratic waste and establishing a
minimal set of meaningful policies, processes and procedures. Let's not
dismiss the idea based on this confusion.

------
thefastlane
it's easy to bark orders at everyone below you to create a bunch of
documentation and then kick up your feet, light a cigar, thinking you've
achieved "systemization" of your company, or some other
operational/bureaucratic aspiration which might or might not have a firm
grounding in reality.

the harder, narrower road: hire smart people, feed into your team, and do your
best to stay out of their way. this is by no means easy -- it's a lot of work
putting together a team and leading a team and running interference so they
can shine. but it's totally worth it.

(edited for tone and clarity)

~~~
erikb
In some regards this reflects how I experienced many managers. Understanding
that a management task needs to be done (e.g., define a business process),
then go to an employee below and charge them with doing it.

However, a good manager also adds value. If you work as engineer you are
exhausted after a programming task and don't really want to write notes down.
But you yourself already know that you actually really should do it. Having a
manager to motivate you and help you improve your documentation and formatting
skills can go a long way to find out what happened in that task 6 months ago.

------
untilHellbanned
That was a whole lotta nothing

~~~
erikb
Actually not totally true. There was some content in there. But since it
wasn't structured that well it's hard to see. Putting everything in a process
is like putting your code in a class. It's not absolutely necessary but helps
structuring stuff.

A process is a regular activity that solves a certain problem for a certain
consumer group (the consumer may be an employee of your company, e.g. when the
process is mail hosting for your company). Writing down the usual steps to
take helps people to not forget stuff when doing the job, and helps
managers/QA make sure everything is there to close a task.

Also each process has typical roles, e.g. someone who is responsible for the
process adding value to the big picture (process owner), someone who is
responsible for getting the day to day problems out of the way (process
manager), and someone who actually does the steps involved in the process
(process practicioner). With this structure it is easier to see when something
is missing. E.g. in corp life one can often find a process with more than one
owner, more than one manager, but zero practicioners, which results in nothing
getting done at the end of the day.

Also you can think about how all that may relate to Scrum and co. There you
also have these roles like board owner, scrum master and engineers.

All this stuff is somewhere in the article, but it's not layed out very well.
Probably written by a person who works on a daily basis with people who
already know all that, which of course makes the tutorial nature of the
article worhtless. One may guess there was a blog post practicioner, but no
(real) manager.

------
Avernar
Anyone have "systemise" on their bullshit bingo card?

