Even people who don't celebrate a holiday in December feel the effects of largely empty office buildings, holiday parties, extra traffic, and ever-expanding end-of-year task lists. Productivity is part of APQC's name, and we still experience lags during December. It can be difficult to stay focused…

Good intentions are fine when it comes to giving gifts to people you don't know very well, being late for dinner even though you left work early, or forgetting to buy milk even though you wrote it on your list, but they are not enough to make a business successful. Sure, I want to do business…

Whew! APQC's 2011 process conference was a huge success. We hosted some fantastic presenters who shared information that people could actually go home and use. You can view the presentations in our 2011 Process Management Conference Presentations and Slides collection. Great stuff in there.…

It's great to be at APQC in Houston right now! Those of you who aren't here… well… you're missing out. First of all, Houston weather is perfect this time of year. When the rest of North America starts shivering, we venture outside to enjoy temperate perfection. And if it happens to rain, no problem…

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…

Without proper change management, you can forget about moving your organization to process management. There is a reason change management is located at the heart of APQC's Seven Tenets of Process Management—number four of seven. All the other tenets, in a way, revolve around change management. The…

It doesn't take much interaction with APQC before you hear about benchmarking. Our business revolves around collecting data, conducting studies, and sharing information. Our mission is to connect organizations with one another to learn. But did you know that we have dozens of resources to help you…

Executive: We need to implement business process management. How do we go about doing it? Colleague: Well, we don't have a center for process improvement, and the group that usually handles enterprise projects does not have expertise in process management specifically. Executive: I hear that…

It's difficult to shake off old patterns, especially when those patterns are dysfunctional processes in an organization. Most organizations have processes that they know do not work, and yet they hold onto them—sometimes for years. Take the stage-gate process in product development for example.…

Ah, measurement… It's been too long since I wrote to you. You do such wonderful things for us in business. You show us how everyone is performing right now and warn us when there could be trouble ahead. What's more, you make new things happen and help people see how far we've come. I realize all…