Good afternoon,
Today, I want to share a tool the OE team often deploys to help streamline operations and enhance consistency: a playbook.
Playbooks establish procedures and guidelines for teams to follow. They aren’t just pages of text but are intentionally designed to make the information easy to consume with graphics, screenshots, and less text on each page than traditional documentation. They are both a training aid and a resource that can be referred back to again and again by employees. By documenting best practices in this format, playbooks help teams work more efficiently, onboard new team members smoothly, address common challenges, and prevent the loss of critical information when there is turnover.
The most recent playbook the OE team developed was an insurance playbook for the front desk staff at the Adams School of Dentistry’s Dental Faculty Practice. We partnered with staff from Patient Business Services and the Dental Faculty Practice to detail workflows, processes, and best practices and develop a playbook. Patient Business Services team members used the playbook as a guide for training front desk staff members. Then we collected feedback on how to make it more helpful as an ongoing resource and made updates before sharing it with participants for future reference.
The OE team has developed numerous playbooks and we believe that a well-developed playbook is a valuable tool that saves time and resources.
Please feel free to share this email with your colleagues. You can also visit our website to learn more about Operational Excellence, read my previous updates, and submit feedback. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at wernoski@email.unc.edu. I read every email.
Best,
Rick