Best Practices of Process Improvement
Process Improvement Best Practices
Overview
This reference is intended to capture best practices Process Consultants identify from external sources or while working on process improvement projects.
Involve Employees: Organizations who involve employees in the process improvement process realize greater success. Employees are critical because they are the best resource for knowing how to increase value to customers. They know where problems exist and often have valuable improvement recommendations. Furthermore, when they are involved in selecting and implementing changes, they can better understand the need for and internalize the changes. They become your greatest champions for improvement when they are a valued part of the solution, as opposed to being isolated and resistant at having misunderstood changes forced upon them.
Put in Place Just Enough Process: A process-mature or process-capable organization is not one that necessarily has lots of processes and detailed information about them. A process-mature or process-capable organization is one that for any given situation can answer the question: "How much process is enough?" In so doing, it can avoid overburdening itself with processes that do not add value (over and above their costs) and avoid unnecessarily detailed processes and procedures. Therefore, such organizations expend just enough control and management time to ensure compliance.
Measures: Measurements need to support business goals such as: * Managing costs * Meeting technical requirements * Improving productivity * Managing and improving process effectiveness
These measures must be precise and robust, suggest a norm, relate to specific product or processes, and indicate an improvement strategy. They should also be simple, predictable, and a natural result of the process. Each process analysis effort requires decisions about the measures, process, storage, analysis, reporting, and feedback. Effort to collect measurements
Overview
This reference is intended to capture best practices Process Consultants identify from external sources or while working on process improvement projects.
Involve Employees: Organizations who involve employees in the process improvement process realize greater success. Employees are critical because they are the best resource for knowing how to increase value to customers. They know where problems exist and often have valuable improvement recommendations. Furthermore, when they are involved in selecting and implementing changes, they can better understand the need for and internalize the changes. They become your greatest champions for improvement when they are a valued part of the solution, as opposed to being isolated and resistant at having misunderstood changes forced upon them.
Put in Place Just Enough Process: A process-mature or process-capable organization is not one that necessarily has lots of processes and detailed information about them. A process-mature or process-capable organization is one that for any given situation can answer the question: "How much process is enough?" In so doing, it can avoid overburdening itself with processes that do not add value (over and above their costs) and avoid unnecessarily detailed processes and procedures. Therefore, such organizations expend just enough control and management time to ensure compliance.
Measures: Measurements need to support business goals such as: * Managing costs * Meeting technical requirements * Improving productivity * Managing and improving process effectiveness
These measures must be precise and robust, suggest a norm, relate to specific product or processes, and indicate an improvement strategy. They should also be simple, predictable, and a natural result of the process. Each process analysis effort requires decisions about the measures, process, storage, analysis, reporting, and feedback. Effort to collect measurements
References: * BPM101 Course Materials * Silver, 2009, BPMN Method & Style, Aptos, CA * Gartner, 2010, Top Six Foundational Steps for Overcoming Resistance to ITIL Process Improvement