Thoughts on Process Improvement

In my first post, I stated an assumption that there is a relevant business need for every process improvement project and did not talk about that in any further detail.

I received some feedback that this topic merits more discussion than a honorable mention. My assumption brings forth a very pertinent question. Why does process exist? Lets just look at a few definitions for process.

A process is a set of activities that produce products and services for customers. (Source: GAO’s BPR Glossary of Terms)
A process is an organized group of related activities that together create a result of value to customers. (Source: Michael Hammer)

There are a multitude of other definitions that possibly do not have the word I have highlighted in bold above — customers. But regardless of which definition you chose to follow and whether it explicitly states or not, a process exists to serve a customer need.

So when you walk into a process improvement scenario, it may be a great idea to see if there is a “well defined” customer for the output of the process and whether it is possible to articulate their needs simply and clearly. Call it Objective, call it outcome, call it anything, but to quote Habit 2 (of the famous seven from Covey), begin with the end in mind.

In my experience (and most likely yours), I have seen initiatives that were abandoned midway (without realizing their full potential) when there was a general disagreement among the many stakeholders in terms of the outcome and worse still, not too much clarity on the end customer. I am not sure how many of you faced this but many times when I start off on a project one of the challenges I encounter is mapping stakeholders and determining with surity who the end customer is. Its easy to get a list of names but the complexity arises when you have to ascertain the role each of these names play on the project.

I will illustrate the above statement with an example. Assume that you are working on processes that ultimately help pay commissions to the sales agents in your company in an accurate and timely manner. To do this, you obviously need to work closely with people from HR, Finance and operations who are the actors in your process. They are the people who actually follow the process (or use the associated tools). In the entire process, the sales people are involved only when they have to approve or accept their compensation plans and as a process manager, you do not interact with sales people (or do not need to) even once.

So who is the customer in the above scenario?

By the way, this is no trick question. All of you immediately know where I am leading. The problem is that its awfully easy to get lost in operational details and forget focusing on our customer and their needs.

We will talk more about customer and stakeholder management in the next post .