BPS is basically having and applying order in what you do and how you do it; such that your customers don’t get unpleasant surprises. Spoiler alert(I didn’t like it at first).
Introduction; the backstory
Business Process Standardization’ (BPS) is a practice intended to achieve consistency across underlying organizational processes, in support of service-delivery excellence and optimization of costs and benefits.
In the landscape of business operations, maintaining consistency and striving to achieve operational efficiency is paramount for sustained success. Business Process Standardization (BPS) is a great tool in your toolbox while chasing this goal. By standardizing organizational processes, businesses can streamline operations, enhance service delivery, and optimize costs and benefits. In this article, we delve into the essence of standardization and explore how it feeds into operational efficiency.
Why Business Process Standardization Is the Secret to Operational Efficiency
I have started a couple of companies (and closed most of them; I call them lessons) When we started Intelli with my co-founders, we did a lot of documentation, market research and laid down a lot of ground paperwork. Initially I thought all these things were red-tape and bureaucracy when we started, for example how many times we had to meet a week and what we had to discuss in our stand-up meetings, how we had to manage product sprints, how we approached customer engagements and how we approached proposals to companies. I thought all of this was counter-intuitive to productivity and an enemy of creativity. Rules, templates, documented workflows those felt like corporate bureaucracy, the kind of thing that slowed big corporate companies down, not something a blazing fast startup should bother with.
I was wrong.
The absence of standardized processes didn’t make us more agile. It made us inconsistent. Tasks got done differently depending on who was doing them. Quality wasn’t guaranteed, then we also became prone to the keyman/key person risk. Onboarding new people onto the team (whether contractors, interns or collaborators) wasn’t clear and would take forever because nothing was written down, and even for what we had written down there was no strict adherence to. We were fast, sure but we were running in circles, repeating patterns and mistakes we already figured out how to solve.
That’s when I started taking Business Process Standardization (BPS) seriously.
Upon researching and implementing standardization across various aspects of our startup’s operations, we experienced first hand the positive impact it had on our efficiency, consistency, and overall performance. I soon recognized that standardization was not about stifling creativity but rather about creating a solid foundation for growth and innovation.
What BPS Actually Is
At its core, BPS is about establishing clear, repeatable protocols for how work gets done inside your organization. Not to micromanage people, but to create a consistent baseline so that the quality of your product or service doesn’t depend on which team member handles it on any given day.
Think of it like this: a great restaurant isn’t great because the head chef had a brilliant night. It’s great because there’s a recipe, a process, a standard and anyone in that kitchen can follow it to deliver the same experience every time.
The same principle applies to your startup.
Where Standardization Shows Up (And Why It Matters)
Product quality. Whether you’re manufacturing a physical product or shipping software, standards ensure consistency across every unit, every release. Your customers shouldn’t have to gamble on whether they’ll get the good version or the bad version.
Data management. As your company grows, you accumulate data from multiple sources and without a consistent format, that data becomes noise. Standardizing how you collect, store, and label data makes it actually useful for decision-making.
Operations and workflows. Standardized processes reduce redundancy. When everyone follows the same playbook, you eliminate the time wasted on “how do we handle this again?” conversations and reinvest it in actual work.
The Counter-Intuitive Thing About Innovation
Here’s what changed my mind entirely: standardization doesn’t kill innovation it creates the space for it.
When your team isn’t constantly reinventing the wheel for routine tasks, they have more mental bandwidth to focus on the things that actually require creative thinking. The baseline handles itself; the edge cases get the attention they deserve.
Some of the most innovative companies in the world are also the most process-driven. That’s not a coincidence. Look at KFC, you show up at any branch anywhere in the world you are guaranteed the chicken and fries will taste the same at all branches within a country. That’s BPS on steroids.
And yet they manage to maintain innovation(They come up with new menu items or tweak their menu items to fit into and appeal to customers in new markets that have local favourites; )
What I’d Tell Early-Stage Founders
You don’t need to over-engineer this. You don’t need a 50-page operations manual on day one. But you do need to start documenting how you currently do things; seek an optimal path in the current chaos and keep repeating what works early.
Start with the processes that affect your customers most directly. What does your onboarding look like? How do you handle bugs or complaints? How do you do QA before a major release? Write it down. Refine it. Make it the default template.
The startups that scale aren’t always the ones with the most innovative ideas. A lot of the time, they’re the ones that figured out how to do the same thing well, consistently, at increasing volume.
That’s what standardization gives you.
If you loved this article you will love almost all the other ones I wrote. I write about building products, navigating startup life, and the lessons learned along the way.