The goal of process management is to improve performance. Whether the emphasis is customer retention, cycle time, employee satisfaction, efficiency, business growth, productivity, or any other goal, organizations implement process management to improve something. Countless books have been written on the topic, and numerous techniques and methodologies exist to help organizations accomplish these improvements, such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Total Quality Management (TQM).
Although you can pursue process improvement without the benefit of process management—as many organizations do—this typically results in fragmented random acts of improvement. Those individual improvements may look exciting individually, but without an overarching management strategy, they often breed unintended negative consequences that can break other parts of the organization. To avoid this, employ process improvement in tandem with the other tenets of process management, which will lay a foundation for aligned and focused (rather than random) improvement.
The techniques related to performance and maturity (the fifth tenet)—understanding performance through measurement, stabilizing or making processes more consistent through monitoring and control, and identifying opportunities for improvement through maturity assessments—may not yield immediate or glamorous results. But they are necessary prerequisites for aligned and truly effective process improvement.
Improvement comes in two forms: continuous and breakthrough. Continuous improvement is a systematic effort to tweak and tune how a process is performed at the workgroup or individual level. Often, the process itself isn’t improved at all. Instead, the way workers execute the process matures through training, mentoring, experience, collaboration, and knowledge management techniques. Continuous improvement can be done by everyone in the organization to increase process performance in a slow, steady manner.
But there are times when it becomes necessary to make a significant change to a process—how it is staffed, structured, performed, or automated—to rapidly change its products or performance. A breakthrough improvement is needed. Breakthrough improvements often require significant resources and time to design and implement, and they can disrupt the status quo or current flow of work. As a result, they should not be undertaken without thorough evaluation and coordination. The strategic alignment and governance tenets play a significant role here. It is important to pursue breakthrough improvement initiatives only once you have evaluated the potential costs and impacts to areas of the organization beyond the process that will be directly affected.
To truly operate with a process management mindset, an organization must review its processes according to a regular cycle. Successful organizations have a process to improve the process, if you will, and allocate sufficient resources to the effort. If processes are simply left to evolve on their own, organizational performance will most likely deteriorate over time as markets, customers, and the rest of the world changes. Maintaining world-class processes requires consistent effort, sustained monitoring and measurement, and internal and external benchmarking.
For more about process improvement, read Ten Characteristics of Successful Business Process Management Initiatives and Random Acts of Improvement: Detrimental to Performance.
And check out the process improvement-related presentations at APQC's 2011 Process Conference:
- Turnaround of a Business Through the Transformation of Physical Distribution—Reliance Industries Limited
- Management Systems in an International Development Context—Chemonics International
- Deep Dive into a Knowledge Management Process: Building Healthy Communities of Practice at Grant Thornton