The Agree Phase — Obtaining Agreement on Your Core Processes
When you’ve done most of the work on documenting your business process, it can be tempting to rush ahead and push print.
You’re proud of the hard work you’ve done to document the different workflows you manage in the day-to-day running. We get it. But trust us — a team-driven process review (or agreement) will make a big difference in how successful your process ends up.
This step in the journey to a successful review process involves having the whole team agree on the process, from the team member who performs the tasks to the stakeholders who approve everything.
Today, we’re going into the agree phase in more detail to help you determine how to best go about your own business process review.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Where in the process journey is the agree phase?
The image above demonstrates how BuildTheProcess approaches the process documentation journey with clients during working sessions — and where the agree phase fits in that process.
Now, while you don’t have to follow the same process journey, we recommend documenting your existing process before reaching the agree phase.
After all, having a second or third draft that contains a record of each process expert’s inputs and how they have streamlined the process flow thus far facilitates revisions. It’ll also help your team better identify inefficiencies in the current process.
Yes, it’s tempting to add in the new process and rush ahead to packaging the completed process instead. But it’s important to run these changes by the rest of your team to ensure everyone is on the same page — they’ll be the end users. That’s why we call it the “agree phase.”
Just make sure the review team is careful when addressing any pain points. A 2019 McKinsey report found that ineffective decision-making by management translates to roughly $250 million in wasted labor costs every year for an average Fortune 500 company.
What happens during the agree phase?
The agree phase is where your team confirms that the newly documented action plan you’ve created during your internal process review is doable and has support. You want to get all of your process finalized and have agreement from management at the end of this phase.
Once you’ve finished making any necessary changes, you’re ready to move forward with your process journey.
As Gino Wickman puts it in Traction:
“To convince your people to follow the process, your leadership team needs to be committed to managing all of the people to make the adjustment. If you are all committed, it will work.”
In other words, you want to get your team members involved in your process journey for it to be successful. That is the most critical part of the agree stage methodology.
To achieve that, we recommend sitting everyone down and reading the proposed process document as a group. Team members can take the time to ask questions or request changes before everyone agrees on the process together.
After all, collaborative work has risen dramatically — over 50% in the past decade, according to a 2021 Harvard Business Review report. Now, it makes up roughly 85% of the average office worker’s day.
Your processes are not being completed in isolation, so documenting them shouldn’t be done alone, either.
For example, let’s say a process expert has identified a step where they want to make a change, whether it’s incorporating new technology or changing a specific business policy. Have them run this by some team members who also will be working on that part of the process.
Team members don’t need to agree on every part of the documentation. Still, they should be generally supportive of the proposed optimization. It’s less likely that everyone will follow the new process if only one person dictates the direction your process review is heading.
Tips for making the most of your business process review
So, now you know why the agree phase is so important and why you want your team involved. Next is getting the process review done.
For starters, we recommend not getting bogged down in the wording. Remember, perfect is the enemy of done!
And again, get everyone involved. They are part of the process documentation journey and will be responsible for continuous improvement later on. That helps create accountability.
When your team is accountable, they’re more likely to stick to the new process going forward.
We recommend a “table read” of the process as a group. If your team is remote, you can do this on Zoom. But an in-person read-through is best for really checking on comprehension and agreement on the current state of your processes.
This read-through is a place to get everything on the table, discuss any significant disagreements, and make sure you have the whole team on board before publishing this to your company playbook.
Remember, if you don’t complete the agree phase, you could end up forcing a new process on people. Get feedback from the people who complete the process and make sure that’s really how things happen unless you want a lot of surprise revisions.
Final thoughts:
Process review — why the agree phase is crucial
Getting your whole team involved is crucial to ensuring everyone in the organization feels involved with the business process improvement journey.
The agree step also ensures everyone is on board with your new process and that multiple people have approved any initial revisions before it joins your company playbook.
It’s not an easy stage to complete, but BuildTheProcess will be with you every step of your business process review journey.
