Why Process Matters

Many people will ignore process if given the option: nothing will make more eyes glaze over than a discussion of procedure or create more yawns than reading up on the latest process documentation. Yet, there is little more powerful in an organization, and perhaps even in life, than your process. The key to why this is so lies in one word: standardization. The reasons why are two-fold. Without a process, there is no way to understand the How behind your What. Without standardization in that process, there is no way to improve your How or your What. A standardized process is the key to creating a Lean, efficient organization so that you can focus on providing the best possible product or service to your customers.

Your Process

How you do what you do is central to any organization. Without a clear understanding of how to achieve your goals, your organization won't generate revenue for long. A defined process ensures that your product or service can be recreated, and was not simply a lucky accident.  Process is the foundation of repeatability, an essential aspect of sustained success (more on repeatability later). With a process in place, you can reliably reproduce the same product or service again and again.

Equally important is how well this process is communicated and understood by everyone involved, from entry-level employees or volunteers all the way up to senior management. A process only works if people know it, follow it, and can explain it clearly. When your team understands the process, they are empowered to work consistently and efficiently. Then, the stage is set for identifying where improvements can be made. Without shared understanding, even the best process can fall apart.

Standardization

Truett Cathey, the founder of Chick-fil-A, once said that consistency was the most important thing in the restaurant industry. He believed that whether the product  was consistently good or consistently bad, it first has to be consistent: your customer needs to know what to expect. This principle is universal. Consistency is vital in any business, because customers want to know that the product or service they buy from you will be of the same kind and quality as the last. This is where it becomes important to standardize your process. A standard process will lead to consistent results, and not just in the quality of the product. It will lead to consistent safety, cost, and time results for the people doing the process. These consistent results will form your baseline and allow you to predict future results and know when something is going wrong. Now for the big reason to standardize: Only once the process is standardized is it improvable.

Improvements

The main reason to care about process is that an effective, standardized process drives improvement.  Without standardization that is understood and implemented at every level of your organization, your process will be too inconsistent to make any improvements. If the process is changing day to day, person to person, or shift to shift, then any “improvement” you try to implement will get lost in the noise. You won't know if the change helped or hurt, because the baseline was never stable to begin with. Think about trying to fix a moving target—it’s impossible. The same is true with an unstandardized process. 

Without a solid foundation, you’re not truly improving; you’re experimenting without feedback. Once the process is standardized, every deviation becomes a clue, every issue becomes visible, and every small change can be tested and measured. This is where Lean shines. It’s not just about identifying  problems; it’s about creating  a stable environment where those problems can be addressed effectively and sustainably. If your team is constantly firefighting, struggling with variability, or unsure why problems keep recurring, the answer often lies here: the process isn’t stable enough to improve.

Standardize first. Then improve.

Conclusion

Improvement doesn’t happen by accident. Just like a product isn’t created by accident, progress doesn’t come from wishful thinking. It comes from understanding what you're doing, doing it consistently, and then asking the right questions. Once your process is standardized, you can observe it, measure it, and begin to remove waste. And when your team knows what “good” looks like, they can help make it better. This is where Lean and continuous improvement truly take hold—not in flashy projects or expensive software, but in the daily discipline of following and improving standardized processes. If your team struggles with inconsistency, missed targets, or just feels stuck, the first place to look is the process. The next step is to ask: Is it standardized? And finally: How can we improve it?