Operations strategist Cindi Stevenson says most efficiency programs fail long before anyone measures the results. Organizations document a process while it is still bloated, and standardization then preserves whatever condition that process was in. “Efficiency isn’t about doing more with less,” she says. “It’s about doing the right things the right way at the right time.” Stevenson, Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives at Insperity, has spent more than 25 years transforming business operations, and she deliberately orders the work. Simplification comes first, standardization second.
Mapping the Process That Actually Exists
Optimization begins with visibility, and Stevenson notes that it is harder to achieve than most leaders expect. “I often find that organizations operate on assumptions about how work gets done,” she says. The documented workflow describes an intended sequence, while the real work often follows a different path built by the people executing it.
Her approach is to map the current state end-to-end, with input from the employees doing the work rather than the managers who designed it. At Insperity, that means examining workflows in detail, identifying bottlenecks, and locating the points where value leaks out of a process.
What tends to surface is a set of informal adaptations, undocumented steps, unofficial handoffs, and tools created years earlier that several departments have come to depend on. Each of these indicates that the formal process failed at some point and an employee corrected for it privately. “You can’t improve what you don’t fully understand,” Stevenson insists.
Simplifying Before Codifying
Once the actual process is visible, the reduction work begins. Stevenson looks for duplicate steps, handoffs that no longer serve a purpose, and tasks that can be entirely automated. Sequence matters here more than technique. A process codified while still bloated becomes difficult to challenge, because any employee questioning a step is understood to be questioning the standard rather than the step itself. The same act of documentation applied to a streamlined process produces the opposite result, holding the improvement in place and preventing the next person from reconstructing a slower version.
Standardizing So Improvements Hold
Simplification on its own does not last, Stevenson warns. Without documentation, a streamlined process crumbles as new employees develop their own methods and the informal workarounds gradually return. She follows every reduction with clear guidelines, defined role clarity, and repeatable steps that produce consistent results regardless of who executes them. This is standardization used correctly, applied to something already lean rather than to whatever configuration happened to exist when the project began.
Building Continuous Improvement Into the Culture
Treating efficiency as a discrete project guarantees drift once the project concludes, and Stevenson advises against it. She builds continuous improvement into the operating culture through performance dashboards, real-time data, and feedback loops that keep refining the process over time.
The change she is describing is a move from reactive problem-solving towards proactive performance management. A team monitoring its own performance data identifies drift while it remains small and inexpensive to correct. A team waiting for the next efficiency initiative typically discovers the same problem much later, after the workarounds have already reestablished themselves. To learn more, connect with Cindi Stevenson on LinkedIn.
