Thirty years ago when the notion of improving processes began to get traction in the U.S., it held great promise. But one problem has kept the promise from becoming a full reality.
It’s too complicated!
How many organizations have shelves of binders chalk full of process maps and standard operating procedures? Lots. With the hope of improving performance it is common that the hard work is done to document processes and standard operating procedures. Again, the hope is to once and for all eliminate the confusion.
The problem is once it’s written down no one ever looks at the binder again. Unless it’s time for training new employees and then we dust off the binders and hope maybe this batch of people will follow standard procedures.
I have struggled with this dilemma for a long time myself because I know the value of understanding how work should be done – the value of using processes to accumulate and transfer knowledge. I write a lot about management as a process in my book Business at the Speed of Now. But the freight ain’t worth the price.
There is a simpler way. Like in the classic scene in the movie The Graduate, its one word that matters most. While Dustin Hoffman’s character was told it was all about “plastics”, in the case of process improvement you would well advised to understand “Checklist.”
If you want people to follow a process, create a process checklist that focuses them on the handful of factors that determine the processes success. Here are three things to think about in creating a useful checklist:
- Keep it simple – never more than 10 items
- Avoid the classic checkbox; instead require the recording of useful data (a dimension, the cycle time it took, a category or type of repair, etc.)
- Use the data collected to monitor performance, make further improvements and learn
If you put the right things on your checklist, the most important things for the people who work the process to pay attention to, you will get all the benefit of that boring material in the binder without following that hideous manual you know you put somewhere.
A great book to learn more about this is The Checklist Manifesto. I recommend it.
For so long we have worshipped at the feet of the BIG idea. Like a shiny penny, it draws our attention away from other things. In the age of Mass Customization—when customers want what they want it’s the ability to do the little things that makes the difference.
The same is true inside our organizations. Take out your calculator for a second and run a couple of numbers. If you have 100 employees, and today each implements 10 ideas a year that save $2.00 a day. So, $20 worth of improvements (or so it seems), how much does that save your business?
The sad part is most businesses are lucky to get 10 ideas implemented per employee. Run one more number for me. Multiply the number you had a second ago—the savings on those $2 ideas—multiple it by 10. If you had a system of management capable of implementing 100 $2 ideas per employee, how much would you save?
The new BIG idea is the small idea.
We live in a complex world and we work in complex organizations. Whether your organization is small, medium, large or huge, understanding how it all works is no small task. Regardless of its size, the simple reality is the performance of any organization is largely driven by its management system. Ironically, it is rare to see an organization even acknowledge it has a management system. However, this is the “mother of all processes” and until an organization takes conscious control of that system, it will have little control over its performance.
A management system is a collection of processes understood by every employee that focuses the organization and drives it to achieve specific desired results. It creates the priorities, establishes targets, clarifies accountability, allocates and aligns all resources, reviews progress, initiates adjustments and interventions when performance is below target, and drives improvement in all routine work. An effective and disciplined management system ensures the routine work of the organization is delivered with increasing quality and decreasing costs, and that strategic initiatives are effectively executed so they deliver the expected results.
Download the full article, The Mother of All Processes: Part One to learn more about this important key to the NOW System of Management.
Processes are a series of steps or actions that transform inputs into well-defined outcomes or outputs. Well-managed organizations understand that everything they do is a series of integrated processes: purchasing, building, product development, technical support, customer service, hiring, accounting, finance, etc. These organizations also know that their processes and related impacts extend beyond the walls of the organization to include suppliers, partners and customers. Continue reading »
Process ownership introduces a dimension of management that has a huge impact on costs and on meeting internal and external customer needs. Since most processes move across the whitespaces of the organization, any inefficient handoffs from one to the next becomes a huge source of waste, rework, rush costs, customer frustration and employee disengagement. Continue reading »
Over the years, Henry Ford’s mass production system of management and its underlying logic has permeated organizational life from factories to banks to grocery stores and even our educational system. Today few of us realize that the underlying logic of the organizations we work in or run as leaders is in fact based on the model of management Ford invented over a century ago. Continue reading »
One of the great failings of many process improvement approaches has been management’s failure to understand the Theory of Constraints. If process mapping one of an organization’s processes is a good thing, isn’t process mapping 200 of its processes a great thing? Continue reading »
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