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What’s Your Process Management Persona?
Here’s a universal truth: When processes are left to develop organically, they tend to grow up in isolated silos. Invariably, some silos have more mature process-minded approaches than others, making it difficult to integrate and standardize horizontally. Even when there’s a recognized need for…
What Process Management and Knowledge Management Have in Common
I’ve got a confession: Because I’m a “process person” I didn’t expect to be embraced by the attendees at APQC’s recent Knowledge Management (KM) conference. For years, I’ve noticed similarities between the disciplines of process and KM. I’ve seen numerous instances in which what some…
Overcoming Three Common Process Management Misconceptions
If you’re reading this blog, it’s probably because you’re a process person. You understand that almost every business need can be addressed through better management of how people do their work. But for everyone that gets it, there’s often several that don’t. And I believe they don’t get it…
3 Biggest Struggles PCF Users Have
APQC’s Process Classification Framework® (PCF) is the best tool to standardize the language of your process steps, enabling you to accelerate your organization’s ability to: consistently define processes, manage governance, enable apples-to-apples benchmarking, and identify process…
How Process Management can Reduce M&A Risk
‘What could possible go wrong’ when you ignore process tenets? Everything. The world’s worst kept business secret is that most acquisitions fail. Depending upon what metric you use to evaluate success, mergers miss their intended goals as much as 85% of the time. With a…
What Building IKEA Furniture Can Teach You About Process Improvement
The first time you try to put together IKEA furniture, it seems simple enough. You have all the parts; the instructions appear well documented and sequential. But more often than not, 20 minutes in you realize you’ve got trouble: boards are upside down, the unfinished edge is showing on one side,…
Why Taking Process Improvement Shortcuts Gets You Lost
I have a secret:I’ve got the worst sense of direction of anyone I've ever known. I use to hide away this personal failing because I feared it would undermine my professional standing. As a process consultant, I'm supposed to be the guy that shows you how to most efficiently get from Point A to…
Are You Ready to Fix Your Process?
Thus far in our blog series we’ve traveled two-thirds of the way through the process improvement cycle: identified what you do and how you do it, pinpointed which of the things that you do are broken, and figured out which are most broken and will need to be addressed sooner than later…
What Does ‘Fix My Process’ Even Mean?
In the first three installments of this blog series we’ve discussed practical and tactical steps to: Standardize your process descriptions using APQC’s Process Classification Framework Determine who truly owns each process step And identify the knowing/doing gap in your processes The…
Great Process Improvement Begins With Knowing Your Knowledge Gaps
In The Last Blog... We identified governance activities necessary to know which steps in a cross-functional process don’t have an owner or, worse, which may have more than one. In our example, we created a RACI chart to visualize who the responsible and accountable parties are and who needs to…