First published as a white paper “How the Hidden Costs of Inefficient Workflows Drain SME Profits — and How to Fix Them” on the 2nd of November 2025 “The Obstacles” is the second chapter.
Our businesses experience organic growth, and this sometimes results in things spreading a bit too far and wide, making it difficult to see the path in front of us — here are a few suggestions to keep you on the straight and narrow…
Be strategic
Taking a strategic approach transforms workflow management from reactive to proactive:
- Are you making the most out of the software and services you use? Streamlining could reduce costs and technical overhead. Saas sprawl is a genuine governance risk with legal implications.
- Investigate workflow automations services (such as Zapier, Workato, Microsoft Power
- Automate, and IFTTT) to connect essential cloud services and eliminate repetitive tasks.
- When using AI: write comprehensive and precise prompts; be specific about the task(s); and provide constant supervision (I’ll be discussing AI in the chapter: “Case Studies”).
Strategic thinking is about aligning technologies with purpose, ensuring that each process (and, by extension, cloud service) makes a positive contribution.
Be organised
Organisation transforms insight into action. Good processes become sustainable when software, data, and people experience consistent and careful management:
- Audit existing software and attend to unused resources (those belonging to users who have moved on) to reduce costs, or to reallocate.
- Maintain a calendar of subscription renewals (be mindful of punitive cancellation fees).
- Does the software support tags? If so, create logical groups of resources, to make them easier to retrieve.
- Gmail and similar services allow aliases: [email protected] becomes: [email protected] (most email services allow this but need manual configuration), a simple change that improves filtering and tracking.
- Only share the data that’s required (of a task, on a cloud service et cetera) and nothing else.
- Once data has been downloaded and used, delete it from that device.
- Get into the habit of tracking changes in Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
- Keep a journal — knowing that a crucial decision has been made is valuable , but so is understanding when and for what reason.
Organisation is the bridge between strategy and execution — reducing cognitive load, preventing repetition, giving structure to each subsequent improvement.
Be critical
A critical assessment keeps workflows lean, performant, and relevant. In time, each process accumulates habits and redundancies — questioning them is essential to progress:
- Could a task be done in 3 steps instead of 5, or 3 minutes instead of 5?
- How many people need to sign off a decision? Not having everyone available to make an important decision creates drag.
- Minimise the lines of communication to avoid fragmentation, then document and enforce it.
- Seek out instances of “Task X” (inefficient routines) and fix them.
- Remember that bad habits are simple to make but difficult to break.
A culture of constructive scrutiny fosters improvements that, in time, become routine. Each refinement compounds the efficiencies gained from the last.
Be inclusive
Inclusion transforms process management from a technical task into shared responsibilities across the team:
- Your team’s valuable experience is the difference between understanding how something is done and knowing how it should be done.
- Reward ideas that improve workflows — a sense of stakeholdership encourages innovation and participation.
- If supporting employees with disabilities, make sure the software supports assistive technologies (voice-to-text, screen readers, and so on).
Understanding that individual contributions often translate into organisational momentum is vital. When teams understand and shape the workflow, consistency and quality follow.
Be vigilant
No workflow is immune to disruption. Vigilance safeguards both continuity and trust — especially when data and operations depend on multiple cloud services:
- What’s the worst thing that could go wrong? Now plan for it — this could involve the loss of critical data.
- Ensure the data policies of cloud services align with the laws of the land.
- Use password managers (1Password and LastPass) to safeguard important credentials, and enable multi-factor authentication where possible.
- When using AI, do not share anything that’s considered confidential, such as: Personally Identifiable Information (PII); anything that could cause economic damage, reputational harm, or legal issues.
- You have a WordPress website? If so, keep it and its plugins up to date! In general, this advice is applicable to alternative content management systems (CMS).
- Keep all devices (computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile) up to date.
- Use biometric security features when available.
- Consider cybersecurity training — “phishing” scams and “ransomeware” attacks are on the rise.
- Do you own and control the data? Often, what’s know as derivative data (some type of product created from the original data, such as an infographic) is owned by the vendor, while some make it difficult to export the data.
Vigilance sustains everything else. Without it, strategy, organisation, and inclusion risk becoming undermined by avoidable vulnerabilities. Taken together, these principles ensure that workflows remain both efficient and resilient.
Data governance
We return to data governance because it’s a major issue with serious implications, but there are routes forward to reduce risk. Before signing an agreement with a cloud service:
- Demand a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) — DPAs name sub-processors, specifies data residency, and defines deletion timelines, going beyond privacy policies.
- Ask where your data is stored — region, specific cloud provider and region, whether it’s multi-tenant or isolated.
- Read the AI / ML training clauses — many Saas vendors now include provisions to use your data to train their models. Opt-out provisions, if available, are often buried.
- Check sub-processor lists — your data governance is only as strong as the weakest vendor in their chain.
During the period of the agreement:
- Maintain an inventory of Saas data — know what data category lives in each product (PII, financial, IP, credentials). Most businesses have no idea what’s in their Saas estate.
- Keep data to a minimum — don’t put data into a Saas product because you can. Only put in what the product needs to function.
- Do regular access audits — stale accounts and over-provisioned roles accumulate fast in Saas.
- Test deletion — if your DPA says data is deleted within 30 days of termination, test that claim on a non-critical account before you need to rely on it.
Design communication
Design communication is what happens when we use visuals and written words to communicate messages (should they data or information), and examples would include things like logos, adverts, instructive animations, and also user interfaces.
An example of strong design communication would be a good infographic that condenses complex ideas into often colourful graphics that make complex ideas simple to understand.
In recent times, a lot of effort has been poured into user interface design to create common components and concepts (input fields, radio buttons, check boxes and so on), that have been adopted by the various software vendors, to make their products as usable as possible.
When using cloud software, be mindful of the following:
- Is it compliant with accessibility guidelines? For example: the ability to change the size of the text; and to choose a typeface appropriate to someone with dyslexia (there are also people with specific hearing and cognitive requirements). When accessibility compliance isn’t a legal requirement, software that follows recognised standards (such as WCAG 2.1 or EN 301 549) tends to be clearer, easier to learn, and better suited to a diverse workforce. EN 301 549 is the European accessibility standard derived from WCAG.
- Does it provide configurable dashboards that reduce clutter and present at-a-glance information aligned with each user’s priorities?
- Are the support resources and error messages helpful? When stuck or something goes wrong, having an unambiguous path to a resolution is the difference between a single minute lost and several hours wasted.