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

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. 

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. The improvements may look exciting individually, but without an overarching management strategy, they often breed unintended consequences that harm other parts of the organization. To avoid this, APQC recommends employing process improvement in tandem with the Seven Tenets of Process Management, which lay a foundation for focused (rather than random) improvement. 

This article discusses techniques related to performance and maturity (the fifth tenet), which include understanding performance through measurement, stabilizing or making processes more consistent through monitoring and control, and identifying opportunities for improvement through maturity assessments.