RULES of Process Improvement

You can bring in innovative ideas, great looking products, cool automation techniques, state of the art technologies and yet fail to create an impact to improve the processes used in your department.

Reason - people hate change. They would rather use the same disjoint processes to do their work than invest a little time to understand a new tool. You can show charts and graphs and prove all the pros provided by the new and improved process tools yet will not be able to sway the regular users.

So who then can help in implementing process improvement changes in the department - It is the upper management. The top down approach is the only way to kick start a change towards process improvement in an organization. When the management stands behind the initiative the foot soldiers naturally comply and the inertia towards accepting a change is reduced. Bear in mind though - helping the main users is the goal of the process tool but it is not the most important aspect of the tool.

Thus it becomes very essential to understand that the process improvements although geared towards making the life of the user easy should always work for the management. Try and understand what the upper management would like to get out of the process initiatives being introduced. Once you understand their perspective - the rest of the strategy will fall in place.

RULE #1 The new process or tool must provide the management the insight into the various processes used in their department.

So from the vantage point of the management - plot out the data points needed. Usually these data points are related to transition points in a process - ie when one group completes their work and hands over the process to the next, or when a certain task is initiated and completed. The time taken, the dollar amounts if tracked, the groups involved etc.

You have won half the battle when the management is convinced, the next half with the users is the tough one to conquer. Most of the users have used their own styles and own methods to bring about efficiency in doing their jobs. So an introduction of a new tool is basically abandonment of their old process and hence the most efficient way they know to work in their SILOs. The only approach to counter this opposition will be to involve them from the start of the process. The users must feel a sense of ownership towards the new process and the tool.

RULE #2 Invite the users into the brainstorming sessions during the design phase.

Now begins the collection of the existing process steps. To make any improvements it is most important to understand the existing process. Start with noting the gaps in the existing process. If the new tool is not able to fill the gaps then it has failed before commencement.

RULE #3 The gaps in the existing process become the core requirements for the new process. example Centralization of Data Collection, simple interfaces, uniformity in various processes, ease of use and  intuitive enough to master.

Next club the tasks that are repeated across the workflow and make blocks. This approach is similar to the object oriented style of programming wherein repeatable code is encapsulated into classes. Here we get a class of tasks being modularized. How does it help? Once modularized - we can arrange them in any format creating different process workflows for different tasks using the same infrastructure.

RULE #4 Modularize repeatable tasks into process blocks.

After this it becomes a fun project for the solution architect to combine various process blocks to achieve different processes within a department.

RULE #5 Build the new efficient Process workflow

And last but not the least pray hard that the users accept the new tool :-)