WITI LEADERSHIP

Leadership Skills: Improving Business Performance by Improving How Work Flows (Part 2 of 2)
By Marian Cook

In the previous article in this series, we discussed the need to gain a broader understanding of the organization as you grow through you career. Working across functional areas to improve business flows is a way to make that happen while positively impacting business performance. We discussed business process terms, how to pick a work flow to redesign and the basic questions that business process improvement seeks to answer.

In this article, we will review the components to capture during the mapping phase, and questions to answer during the redesign phase. To reiterate the scope of these columns, we are not reviewing it in the detail we use for our massive reengineering engagements.

Instead, we are covering the topics at a high level to introduce you to the concepts and give you the confidence to try it on a smaller scale.

Taking it just one more level down from our previous column, there are several elements to capture when mapping and redesigning workflows:

  1. The process goal and owner
  2. Inputs – what is coming into the process
  3. Organization – what is the structure of the process
  4. Processes – what group of activities to consider in and out of scope, and what those activities are
  5. People – the roles and responsibilities of those involved in the process
  6. Products – what’s being processed (products, customers, patients)
  7. Outputs – what’s coming out of the system
  8. Outcomes – the impact of the outputs
  9. Feedback – continuous information on how you are doing
Quick pointers include organizing around outputs, not tasks, functions or products. Design processes for simultaneous processing and link steps in real time. Capture all critical information once and at the source. Consider including the customer in the process improvement effort.


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

Comments and feedback warmly welcomed at mcook@ageos1.com.