Process audits evaluate the health of a specific process or process group. They are most commonly used to determine critical gaps in understanding, identify factors that impact the performance of the process, and highlight substantive areas for improvement.
To assess the high-level maturity of a business process consistently and objectively, organizations use a maturity model, such as APQC’s process maturity model, shown below. APQC’s model has five levels of maturity that represent the gradient of process maturity from the level of ‘Initiated’ (the lowest level of maturity) to ‘Innovative’ (the highest).
Process characteristics at each level of maturity span five domains to enable evaluation of processes in a holistic and thorough way. The five domains include knowledge, people, process integration, performance, and tools and technology.
Organizations with well-designed process audits align them to the organization’s strategic goals and include these four distinct phases:
- Plan: In the planning phase, the team conducting the audit establishes the audit’s scope in terms of objectives, breadth, and detail.
- Collect: In this phase, organizations collect data using a variety of methods including surveys, workshops, interviews, review of process documentation, and qualitative observations of processes.
- Analyze: During the analysis phase, the team aggregates process audit data and begins to look for patterns, discrepancies, and variations in the data.
- Report: The reporting phase is where the team communicates the results of the process audit to leaders and other key stakeholders to support decision making.
If you’re looking to evaluate the maturity of your organization’s processes, don’t reinvent the wheel; APQC developed a template organizations can use when auditing their process(es).
Process Maturity vs Process Management Maturity
While process audits provide insights into the maturity of a process or process group, process management maturity examines the organization’s approach to process work more broadly. Organizations looking to further understand the difference between the two should read APQC’s article, Process Audits and Process Maturity Assessments: What They Are and How They Are Different.