For high level mapping, frequently it is helpful to diagram activities in 2 categories:

1. Demand for service
2. Delivery of service

We recently had an imperfect situation that required us to map to the service delivery side. For a recent client engagement, the client had a rogue professional services sales person. He had a client’s acceptance of a proposal that he had not gotten approval for. Since there was no standard process to create proposals and estimate the effort, he had made the numbers up and now expected the delivery organization to make it work. In this instance, after addressing the obvious business discipline issues around the sales person, we had to take the deliverables that had been committed to and map backwards to get to the process that would get the commitment met. Once done, we reengineered both the service offering and the proposal process so this wouldn’t happen again.

As you document the processes, keep an issues list of problems, and opportunities for positive change. Once you have the current processes documented, you can start to review how to improve them. As you review the visuals and the issues list, some changes may be obvious.

Other thought provoking questions to consider are:

1. Are there best practices we should be considering?
2. Is there a technology that could make a dramatic improvement and / or would implement best practices?
3. If time, money, labor, technology, and other resources were not a concern, what would the ideal process look like? What would be the barriers and risks to implementing it, and how could they be mitigated?
4. What in the process is considered high value and / or a differentiator by the marketplace?
5. What do we consider to be our core competency? What can we outsource?

Although this has been a brutally brief overview of process improvement, it should demystify it for you and potentially point to ways you can begin to develop these skills and improve the performance of your own organization.

Part 1

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