6 rocketing benefits from business recipes

Do you love to cook? Do you have a recipe book? It’s much easier and quicker to make delicious food when you have a recipe. Ingredients don’t get missed out, and if you get interrupted, you simply go back to the recipe to see where you are in the process. If you are in a real hurry, you can whizz through the steps knowing the final result will be just as good as if you spent hours on it.

Can you imagine the haphazard results you would get if you tried to cook from memory?

Businesses also need good processes, or recipes, for all the same reasons. A process is just that, a standard “recipe” that enables things to be done in the same way every time. Standardising as much as possible means:

1. The task can be reliably estimated for time and resource
2. The results will be the same (or very similar) each time
3. Work will get done faster once the process is established
4. Mistakes (big and small) are less likely
5. You can make changes, and measure the impact
6. Customer confidence will increase as they come to trust your consistent quality

A process may be as simple as a checklist, or as complex as a manual describing how to do something. I saw a wonderful example of a NASA checklist complete with their wicked sense of humour. Quite instructive!

Creating good processes and checklists isn’t rocket science, but it seems rocket scientists wouldn’t go moon-walking without one.