All work is a process.
But is it the right work? I’ll come back to that.
Business Process Improvement is a way of organising how work is done. It is about making the best use of resources, and continually looking for ways of improving everything we do. It involves analysing and improving all the processes in our business so that customers receive goods and/or services that are problem-free and to a specified standard.
It enables us to provide those goods and services efficiently and at the lowest possible cost.
BPI is relevant to all kinds of work. It involves everyone from the owner to the most junior employee. Everyone is encouraged to systematically and creatively pursue the delivery of quality goods and services.
There are five guiding principles:
1. Strive for BPI of Products and Services. The first step is to identify where the process may have under-performed or had been an outright failure. In BPI we encourage people to talk about “opportunities to improve the process” rather than “problems”. This helps people to think positively, to be creative and to look for long term answers rather than short term, band-aid solutions.
2. Focus on Process Problems Rather Than Blame. It’s tempting to characterize people as being solely responsible for an outcome, but there’s more.Raw materials, equipment, software, the effort and skill of people are the resources brought together in a process to achieve a result. When things go wrong avoid blaming the people and instead look at the process for the cause of the difficulties.
3. Meet External and Internal Customer Requirements. Every business or organisation has suppliers and customers. They are critical to its success. The customer who buys products or services is an external customer. The people within an organisation who work alongside each other in a process are also suppliers and customers—those who depend on your work are your customers and you are their supplier.
4. Involve Process Participants in Teams. People who do the work, the process participants, know best how it is done and will have a high degree of mastery. Involving process participants in improving their work is interesting and stimulating and gives them a sense of ownership. People will feel they have a greater contribution to make if they feel this sense of empowerment and autonomy.
5. Make Recommendations Based on Facts and Data. In the BPI approach, decisions are based on facts and data rather than on opinion, gut feeling, intuition and even sometimes, experience. We often find that what happens is quite different to what people think happens. The statistical tools of BPI enable us to track performance over time and to identify and assess opportunities for improvement.
I asked, what is the right work?
Unequivocally: Is this what the external customer still wants?
The problem is that while your process is efficient, it may no longer be effective—the customer doesn’t want it! Customers’ requirements today change faster than ever and keeping up is one thing. Anticipation is another.
Hence Business Process Re-Engineering: we have a crucial conversation with the end customer. We state our intent—establishing their ongoing satisfaction—and then ask them what they want. There are usually 2 possibilities–a different outcome altogether, or a radical change to the current outcome.
Either way, we start again. We can document this through a customer model to assess how important each feature is and how well we are performing.
As always, the customer articulates the ideal outcome—we then design how to do it!
There are a few other possibilities: the external customer doesn’t know what the new outcome is; the internal customers or suppliers may have the ideas for the re-engineered product or process.
For the former, this will take a deeper conversation and an unravelling of the customer’s business. For the latter, they are deserving of their own customer model.
Hopefully, this journey will take us closer to the customer and to their loyalty.
Improve it or start again?
Either way, this process never ends.