Do You Have Unique Methods?

Unique Methods is a concept that I learned from The Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan. Everyone has processes that are unique to them. No two people go about writing a specification exactly the same, for instance. There are three main benefits to identifying your unique methods.

• Once a process is on paper, it can be delegated or taught, freeing you to do other things or getting help doing this thing.
  
• The exercise of documenting your process often leads to improvements in the process.
  
• The more of your process that you can standardize, the less time is spent re-inventing the wheel over and over.
  

You can choose to do this solo, or you can get a group together and tackle the project together. There is no end to what you can think through this way. To give you an idea, here are some of the processes in our firm that we documented.

• Writing specifications
  
• Key steps of every phase of design services
  
• Reimbursable Expenses process (we were leaving over $10,000 per year un-billed)
  
• Invoicing process (we can get invoices out two business days after the end of the month)
  
• File naming convention
  
• Standardized information location
  
• Typical deliverables per phase
  
• Typical tasks for each phase of service
  
• Bidding process
  

In quite a few of these instances we used the form below to document the final result. During the thinking stage of the proces we found that sticky notes on the wall let us see the process better and make changes very simply.

Another article on Unique Methods.
Updated October 14, 2013

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