What challenges do you face in improving business processes?
Any time you introduce change to an organization, challenges can arise. Business process improvement (BPI) is no different. Anytime a process changes, you can expect a rejection from someone! So what are the different challenges you might face and how can you overcome them?
1. Prioritization of work: When there are multiple opportunities, it can be difficult to identify the biggest opportunity. on NBC the big loser, you can easily see who has the biggest problem! You can accomplish the same thing with business processes by creating a Process Prioritization Matrix.
Combine your list, or inventory, of processes and prioritization criteria into a single spreadsheet, using rows to list business processes and columns to list criteria. If you don’t have established criteria to help you prioritize, identify some by thinking about the impact, current state, and value of existing processes as a starting point. Start your improvement efforts with the highest scoring process.
2. Avoid scope creep: Once you start working on a single business process, you can easily get sidetracked from the original focus of the work. Have you ever started a project at home and then found that one thing leads to another? This happens all the time in BPI work because new ideas, demands, and needs arise as you come into the job, and the temptation is to continually expand the scope of a BPI effort.
Before you start working on improving a business process, establish a foundation for your work. Similar to building a house, where the foundation supports the weight of the entire structure, the process”Flat” will help you avoid scope creep. While you can do this in a variety of ways, I find it helpful to create a one-page document that includes, at a minimum:
- a description of the process that anyone can understand
- the process boundaries (where the process begins and ends)
- the client and their needs
- a list of measures of success
3. Involve people: In the perfect world, you have sponsorship for BPI, but this doesn’t always exist. Colleagues may not see “what’s in it for me,” or you may not have a culture of improvement in your organization.
Employees have to “own” process improvement to achieve sustained success because that’s where ENERGY of business process improvement is found! Until everyone in an organization sees BPI as part of their normal daily responsibilities, process improvement will always come and go.
While managers clearly have a role (they are also employees), their responsibility lies in creating the right environment for process improvement. The problem with this idea, however, is that many managers got to where they are today because of their ability to generate results as individual contributors.
All managers should include BPI in their annual performance plan and have part of their year-end review focused on their achievements in this area. However, they can’t see BPI as an “event” that they can bookmark: it’s a process, just like anything else!
4. Managing difficult people: During any BPI effort, you’ll find someone you probably wish would “go away.” You may be wondering why they resist change or display negative behavior.
you should discover the fountain your colleague’s concern. Forget about the BPI for a minute and try to identify what the person values and then match the BPI benefits to those values. For example, if a colleague values job security, you should show him how BPI will allow him to keep his job, perhaps doing more value-added work. Once you connect results to values, you can overcome almost any challenge.
5. Change of priorities: As new management enters an organization, priorities can change. So how can you stay focused on BPI?
The key is to stay focused on the client. If a new manager comes in who only seems to care about the bottom line, take the time to explicitly link “BIS,” “customers,” and the “bottom line.” Only customers contribute to a company’s profits and they keep this concept at the core of everything they do.
6. Criticize your improvement technique: Sometimes colleagues prefer to use another improvement method than the one you think. You may be faced with the dilemma of which one has a better reputation on your computer. Is it Lean, Six Sigma, Reengineering, Lean Six Sigma, or something else?
Actually, most enhancement techniques boil down to “qualityAll techniques have the same goal: to achieve improvements in the delivery of a product or service to the customer, and they all have a connection to the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement. While the various techniques have some differences, you will see more similarities than differences. You should feel free to take the best of several techniques, combine them, and select a name that works for your organization.
Copyright 2011 Susan Page