Category: Pamela Ayuso

Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell – Part 2

Pamela Ayuso August 5, 2019

If you are thinking about implementing processes at your company, the task of doing so can feel daunting. Additionally, getting the infrastructure off the ground is a lot of work, but it’s also a great investment of time and effort.

Processes are a group of tasks that are performed to obtain a desired objective within a company. Outlining the main processes and implementing them for you and your team will result in greater efficiency, adaptability, and peace of mind. In Part 1 of this post (add link), I outlined the initial steps for implementing processes at a firm.

Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell – Part 1

Pamela Ayuso July 29, 2019

Once a business grows to a certain level of success, it becomes an absolute necessity to organize daily tasks to avoid mistakes. Errors happen all the time, and inconsistencies can result in unhappy customers, tense employees, and unbudgeted costs.

The best way to organize these daily duties is to create and implement business processes. A process is a group of tasks that are performed within a business to obtain a specific objective—it is like a chain of events that guides a project from start to finish. By clearly outlining for yourself and your company what the main processes in your company are and how, ideally, they should work, you will gain greater efficiency.

New Software: When and How to Implement into Your Business

Pamela Ayuso July 15, 2019

As a leader in a small or medium-sized company, you are already working with a set of software solutions that take care of most of the organization’s transactions, such as sales, purchasing, and accounting. These systems were usually implemented when the company was in its beginning phases. When the company didn’t have any systems yet, you probably invested in the best software available within your budget and solved as many of the transactions in your company as possible.

As is often the case in small to medium-sized companies, budgets are usually constrained, which means that the set of systems you have implemented for the company will not be flawless. You may have already invested in separate software for sales, accounting, project management, and document storage. Alternatively, you may have invested in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, which is a single solution that integrates a variety of areas in your company. No matter what combination you are working with, there will almost always be gaps.

Maintaining Faith: Build It and They Will Come

Pamela Ayuso July 8, 2019

If your product is built right for your client, they will come. More often than not, it will work out as you envisioned.

One Way to Increase Your Productivity: Keep What You Need Close

Pamela Ayuso July 1, 2019

Each day, we have the same amount of time to do what we set out to accomplish. We can’t create any more time, and there also has to be enough time to rest and do other activities outside of work. It makes sense, therefore, to use the time we do have for work as productively as possible. The more efficient you are, the easier you will make your daily work for yourself. Every second that you can save in your everyday routine will add up and contribute to more useful time overall.

One way to be more productive is to keep everything you need, both digitally and physically, close at hand and easily accessible. Knowing where everything is located and being able to find it with no wasted effort will save you tremendous time. Suppose you spend an average of one minute a day looking for documents or any tool you need to do your work. Of course, this amount of time is on the lower end, as we generally waste much time searching for lost emails, files, or sorting through pens that don’t work. If you work 250 days a year, that is four hours a year you spend looking for lost items. Now suppose the average goes up to five minutes a day– that adds up to over 20 hours a year.

The Value of a Little Patience When Automating Processes

Pamela Ayuso June 24, 2019

When implementing a new process in a company, it takes some time to find a new rhythm of work. Routines and habits must change, and the team has to adjust to the new way of doing things. It requires patience, and sometimes, in the middle of the transition, you may wonder whether it will ever work.

Once the implementation is completed successfully, though, it’s beautiful to see. The process you had been working on now operates independently without you having to do anything about it. The team, the systems, and the processes have all adapted, and the new way of doing things is the new normal.

How to Make Sense of This Crazy World

Pamela Ayuso June 17, 2019

I used to think that I could build a perfectly structured company in which everything would be neat and tidy. I tirelessly designed and organized the company to ensure the structure would be failproof. Little by little, that idea was slowly torn apart as I discovered how little is actually in my control. The world and life itself can change in an instant. An organization will be put under stress and sometimes experience failures no matter how organized it is.

At times the changes may come slowly and are easier to adapt to. Other times, a circumstance may be a game changer and can present itself unexpectedly, to which we have no choice but to adapt. Given that this is how the world operates, how can we succeed in the middle of all this uncertainty? How do we operate effectively in a world that sometimes makes no sense? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some strategies I’ve been experimenting with for some time.

Assess How Effective You Are at Delegating

Pamela Ayuso June 10, 2019

As you advance in your career, the ability to delegate becomes more important. By delegating, you will have more time to focus on the work where you can add the most value. You will also provide the space for others to get valuable training and move up in their careers. Take a moment today and assess your effectiveness in delegating.

To start, analyze your current workload. Some of the questions you can ask yourself are:

What are you doing today that you can delegate to free up time for yourself?
Is there a specific task that only you can do which you are neglecting to do something that another person on the team can do?
Can someone do part of the work you are doing more effectively (or efficiently) than you?

Why You Need to Practice Perseverance to Achieve More of Your Goals

Pamela Ayuso June 3, 2019

Perseverance is one of the key ingredients to accomplishing anything worthwhile in life and professionally. Growth is not always linear: there are usually ups and downs. Sometimes it may even feel like you took two steps back when what you intended was to move forward. At times like these is where perseverance is most useful; it encourages us to keep going. You may not know for sure when you’ll get there or what you will discover along the way, but perseverance will ensure you keep going long enough to find out.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of perseverance is:

“continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition”

Setbacks happen often enough that it is difficult to stay on track. Part of growth is persevering: having the ability to face challenges and move past them. The problems we encounter can either be defeating empowering. Instead of pushing us to quit, they can help us grow in our capacities as professionals and leaders. Once we achieve our objectives, we will be able to handle more.

Configuring Processes to Gain More Efficient Results

Pamela Ayuso May 27, 2019

Our company recently underwent a company-wide process revamp: we examined all our processes, revised the content, and standardized the formatting since it was not consistent across departments. This project underlined the importance of setting up processes to be as clean and organized as possible with proper categorization and structuring. This deliberate configuring helps the user focus on the language itself and not be distracted by discrepancies in the arrangement of the processes.

We have processes for every department within our company. Some departments, like Finance, have more processes than others based on the nature of the work. For more on how we use processes at Celaque, our firm, please refer to my blog posts on processes: The Benefits of Implementing Processes in Your Business, How to Improve and Grow Your Business with Effective Processes, and 6 Useful Ideas to Make Your Processes More Streamlined.