Best Practices in Process Improvement: The Seven Tenets of Process Management

This best practice has been updated from the original published in 2011. The goal of process management is to make the organization better—to give it a stronger position in the marketplace, to grow a work force of engaged and motivated employees, to increase productivity and quality, and to net more profits. The key to achieving this goal is not only to understand processes, reorient the business around them, and strengthen communication throughout the enterprise, but to constantly look for opportunities to improve all of those elements. An organization can use countless improvement methodologies (e.g., Six Sigma, Lean) to achieve this, but unless improvement projects are executed within the aligned context of process management, the organization risks wasting efforts on random acts of improvement. You can adapt the best practices in this article to develop a successful approach continuous and breakthrough process improvement.