As we move up the career ladder from tactician to strategist, it is important to also broaden our understanding of the business. We need to go from understanding our corner of the world to how work interrelates and flows in and outside the business. From a leadership and career development perspective, it is key to have cross-departmental knowledge, and this article represents a first peek at how to build it while improving the business.

We will do this by discussing how to improve business work flows, but not at the level of an enterprise-wide business process re-engineering project. When we do those with our clients, it can encompass large teams and sophisticated software. Instead, the purpose of this article is to give you a brief overview of workflow analysis and change such that you can build your skills and do it on a smaller scale.

First, a few terms to review. A business process is a coordinated set of actions that produce a business result. An example would be opening a customer account or creating a purchase order. Business process mapping is documenting activities across functional activities such as manufacturing or marketing. The goal is to capture how the different parts of an organization work together to serve customers. The result is a process map, or a visual representation of a process that displays inputs, outputs, tasks performed, and task sequence. There is quite a set of nomenclature and tools around this, but do not be put off. For very simple and small projects, we have used post-it notes and a very big wall!

When first launching a work flow improvement effort, you should select which work flows to redesign. Just a few things to consider include when making that decision:

• Follow the money... Which processes are important in generating revenue? Which use a high level of resources where cost reduction opportunities may exist? What process brings the most value to the client?
• Where are the problems? What process or organization appears to cause the most problems? Where is there a strong quality improvement need? Which of these processes seem to have the highest impact?
• Where can technology make a significant process improvement?
• Which processes cross the most organizations within the business?