How to Improve the How: Basics

How do you improve processes effectively? Here are some initial ideas:

Recently, I was asked by a business owner, who was skeptical of process improvement approaches due to his experiences in his Fortune 500 past.   He, like myself, had witnessed programs go terribly wrong, through a mix of recipe-driven approaches, sub-optimization  and politics(rob Peter to pay Paul, as well as poor leadership.

The first thing to remind people is the importance of HOW you do things (processes). How you do things does determine how well your people will do them. How you do things does determine how much of specific resources (money, time, technology….) you will use.  How you do things does determine how your customers will respond. How you do things does actually determine how well and how long you can do them well….  Without understanding and focusing on how you do things, it is very difficult to solve problems, to improve and to learn from the past.

Understanding and agreeing with this enables you then to consider the easier things you can do to "pick the low hanging fruit."

The first idea is thatyou have to be grounded in reality such that it is.  This means, you need to understand how things really work.  There really is no substitute to working with the people involved in the process to map things as they are  and then question, with them, the assumptions as to why and what they are doing.

Secondly, there are bad and good things to be learned from all these buzzword programs from TQM to Six Sigma to LEAN to TOC.  I'll leave that to other posts to discuss these in detail but one key point is that, with all the focus by tens of thousands of professionals in this area, there are a lot of resources for learning from the successes and even learning from the failures.

Third, you need to recognize that  office or non-manufacturing processes h

ave similarities but also great differences from manufacturing processes;  Along with this, understand that the opportunity with administrative/office processes for cost reduction and effectiveness improvement is actually far greater than with manufacturing but a bit more difficult to realize.

Fourth, even if you are focused locally on a process improvement project, you need to measure results at the organization level as it is more common than not for costs and wastes to simply be moved from the area of focus to one that is not being focused on. This improves the local process but often makes the organization's situation worse.

Fifth, you need to go into the effort with a proven process to improve the process.