Our customers apply a broad range of techniques when it comes to improving their business processes, with one such technique being Value Stream Mapping.

Value Stream Mapping can be applied to most processes and seems to be a useful, visual approach to analysing a process for improvements. We’ve seen some great examples with coloured post-it notes covering entire walls on butcher paper.

• Problem: what happens after the analysis and design phase? Where does this information go? It’s no good if you’ve uncovered some great insights and they’re left on butcher paper.
   
• Answer: it’s no different to any other process change. Improvements, large or small, should be blended seamlessly into ‘the way we work’, through your process repository.

Resist the temptation to ‘hit publish’ using a funky new set of shapes and formats for the different techniques you use to expose process improvements or you risk confusing business teams. Also, techniques such as Value Stream Mapping often look at processes at the level of detail most useful for analysis (deep dive), which is not necessarily the best for engagement with teams who are just after some process guidance.

So if your intention is to promote process discussion and collaboration as an everyday activity, your process knowledge formats shouldn’t change with each technique applied to improve them.

Talk of economic growth has cropped up in the news a lot lately. At last we have some economists claiming that the financial crisis is withering and that the global economy may finally be on the rise. Of course there are naysayers that disagree, but many organisations with bleak outlooks only a year ago are now predicting growth - and in some cases, strong and/or rapid growth.

This got us to thinking about how businesses are affected by growth. Surprisingly, it’s not all positive.

Growth can actually increase business risks and history has proven time and again that there is no assurance that a small success will scale into a big success without some pain along the way. There are advantages to identifying where these growing pains may crop up - ideally before you are in the thick of it. We took a look into common causes and treatments of growing pains associated with business processes. How would your business processes cope if your output expectations were to triple?

Download our whitepaper - Top 7 ways to gear your business processes up for growth now and be sure to let us know your thoughts.

Last week I spoke to a company who explained to me how important RACI is to their organisation and asked how Promapp caters for it. It took me a few seconds, but I realised it was fairly straightforward to explain. Many of you will have made use of RACI before. For those of you who haven’t it's a matrix used to define business process stakeholders:



In the context of business process management - this has huge relevance. BPM is all about teamwork, collaboration and sharing of ideas to constantly improve the way we work.

Unfortunately too often in the real world, the understanding of RACI degrades to an annoying little table near the end of process documentation that isn’t looked at and isn’t updated for each change because it’s duplicate editing (update the actual procedure then have to update the same in the RACI table).

As it happens, Promapp automatically triggers RACI communications and changes. No surprise really because effective process improvement depends on all the right people being consulted and informed when processes change.  
In Promapp;

• Those Responsible for execution of a process are those roles in the swim-lanes of the process map
• Those Accountable are the Process Owner and Process Expert, plus process approvers if you use Process Approval Workflow module
• Those Consulted are other noted stakeholders, including those automatically recognised because they are own upstream and downstream processes
• Those Informed – include all of the above plus process group stakeholders who are informed via dashboard notifications

So it was a pleasant realisation that Promapp already satisfies the needs of RACI. It got me thinking though - why not add an actual RACI matrix into Promapp? So watch this space - we're thinking we will. 

Is RACI something used in your organisation? We’d love to hear from you if it is.

Right, better go talk to the development team!

Watch this short video to see how RACI is used in Promapp.

So it’s that time of year when you start trying to find ways to get out of that gym membership you signed up for in January, and your new year’s resolutions to exercise more have fallen by the way-side, but has the same thing happened with your improvement initiatives?

Sustaining process improvement initiatives can be viewed in a similar way to sustaining an exercise programme - you start off enthusiastically with the best intentions in the world, but real life, inevitably, gets in the way. However, exercise contributes massively to your health, so if you make time and stick with it you’ll reap the rewards right? Well, process improvement is critical to your organisations’ health and the rewards for taking process improvement seriously can make all the difference between being a well performing organisation to being a top performing organisation.

Here are some tips to ensure your process improvement efforts stay fit and healthy:

Make more time
Do you fall into the camp of those people who don’t have time to document/look at/improve their processes? (Don’t feel too bad, lots of people do!) Well, have a read of this quote from Gartner:

“Enterprises that put processes front and centre consistently outperform those that don't. They're quicker to adapt to changing business conditions. They're more responsive to their customers. And they're seizing opportunities that are lifting revenue and profitability to a whole new place.”

Four reasons to make time right there.

Do it right
You know the saying ‘no pain, no gain’? You may not want to hear it, but it’s true. Doing things properly and thoroughly from the word go will save you time and effort in the long run. Document all your current process (as they are) first, get all the players involved, store them in an accessible and simple way so that they’re easy for people to follow and straight-forward to find – if you miss out this part people won’t use them and you’ve no real way of improving them in a sustainable way.

It’s ok to start small
You’re the Finance Team and you’re the only one’s taking process management and improvement seriously in your organisation?  That’s ok. Department or project level is a good way to start. You can be the trail blazers, and once you start reaping the rewards of your improvement efforts other areas will follow.

Celebrate wins
Your processes for dealing with a customer query have been documented and reviewed, but you still have 10 more groups to go – celebrate! Celebrating small wins will help to keep motivation and engagement high.

Long-term lifestyle change
Remember, process improvement isn’t just for the first few months of the year when intentions are good – stick at it!  Make process improvement part of everyone’s KPIs, include process stats in your monthly meetings, etc. Continuous improvement takes more than one person and it takes effort, but the rewards to your organisation or team are more than worth it.

So, even if all your new year’s resolutions have fallen by the way side, make sure process improvement stays on track – it’s imperative for the health of your organisation.

We recently took part in a CIO event where the main topic of conversation was 'repeated process crises and how to avoid them'. Some recent large scale process failures in New Zealand prompted these discussions, and as it's in the news yet again this week we thought it important to share some of the key points from the lively discussion.

Three main hurdles were highlighted in the discussion:

Lack of Leadership: The majority of organisations accept that our processes and the way we deliver value for customers are critical to success. Yet less than 25% of those at the event had an executive level owner for process knowledge management. Strategies to protect and improve our process knowledge still seem below the radar of most of these executives. Teams buy into the importance of process excellence when it's included in the vision communicated from the top.

A weak brand: Basic terms like 'process' and 'standardised' actually have bad connotations at many organisations. The brand 'process improvement and quality' needs to be fixed - culturally we place greater value on ad hoc innovation attitudes over 'getting it right first time'.

Sharing process knowledge: Most organisations at the event admitted they suffered from ignored process documentation. Information is now shared in various online, immediate and dynamic forms such as; YouTube, Google, social media and smart phones - process knowledge sharing lags well behind these approaches. It's time to invest some time and effort to bring our process sharing up-to-date. Isn't it too important not to?

Everyone plays a part in process management (and improvement) and it's everyone's job to help ensure their organisation isn't the next leading news story, from the person on the shop floor making sure they read the process carefully to the executive team ensuring it's front and centre in their organisation. So, let's focus on how to avoid the crisis entirely, rather than wringing our hands over the damage control response each time.

"Enterprises that put processes front and centre consistently outperform those that don't. They're quicker to adapt to changing business conditions. They're more responsive to their customers. And they're seizing opportunities that are lifting revenue and profitability to a whole new place." Gartner

See how Promapp can help your organisation mange their processes effectively and simply.

We hear of so many projects that start with best intentions – to fix some obvious problems. Many months and often millions of dollars later, they’ve morphed into something entirely different, promising to implement 1001 features to miraculously cure 1001 ills.

We stumbled across this great article with themes that might resonate for many readers: Is desire for ‘all-in-one’ functionality the reason for IT failures?

Here at Promapp we strongly agree with Ray’s observations: “… a desire to implement every possible feature… scope creep that adds unnecessary complexity and creates systems that are unwieldy to implement and unnecessarily difficult to operate.”

Beware the swiss army knife approach to implementing features and processes. They might not only be ignored, but may jeopardise the core purpose for the project in the first place, to fix those obvious problems.  

Here’s a tip from the visionary Steve Jobs. We apply this thinking in our own R&D processes, when selecting which features and functionality to build into Promapp.

 ”I’m actually as proud of the things we HAVEN’T done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying “NO” to 1,000 things.”

 Complexity is not clever, simplicity is.

There's a long history of lessons from military tactics that can be applied in business.  I really like this fable of Napoleon's approach for making sure his instructions were clearly understood.  Here's an excerpt from Gordon Tara's excellent blog post:

Napoleon routinely picked the dumbest soldier in his army and appointed him lieutenant on his personal staff. Before issuing an order to his army, he would give the order to this lieutenant and then ask the lieutenant to repeat it back. If the lieutenant made a mistake, Napoleon would re-write the order until the lieutenant got it right. Napoleon's reasoning was that if the lieutenant could understand the order, then surely his generals could also understand the order.

The moral of the story is that it is not the manager's responsibility to give instructions that can be understood, but rather, the manager's responsibility is to give instructions that cannot be misunderstood."

The last paragraph struck me as absolutely what we aim to achieve for our clients - helping teams get processes right for them, every time.

I think Napoleon's understanding of human nature is bang on, and exposes why our pages of process and procedural content have been ignored for so many years. Many of the change programs I worked in were creating process guidance that 'could' be understood.  Sure it might be detailed, but it was more often than not difficult to find the information you needed. So, using this yardstick, the answer is that yes, the information was created and filed somewhere at the end of the project and could be understood. To give instructions that cannot be misunderstood however, now that's much harder.

It takes more effort to achieve clarity and simplicity for the intended audience, but this can have drastically different results on customer satisfaction rates, achievement of targets, reduction in rework, etc. etc. I think teams have been screaming out for this sort of simplicity and clarity for years, so consider some of the principles we've talked about before and make sure your processes and procedures cannot be misunderstood.

Take a look at how Promapp could help you.

Many of us work for results-driven organisations where process culture is a consideration, but only in as much as we need to demonstrate compliance with regulations - other than that, it’s considered a bit of a drag.

The culture of ‘it’s OK to bend the rules’ is adhered to because it’s easier, faster and more stimulating to apply your knowledge and experience to make decisions as you go - you know your job, go do it.

A recent example demonstrated the down-side and consequences of this culture. Maintenance teams at an airline felt like all the paper-work and procedural cross checking was taking longer than the job itself, so it wasn’t always done. Managers knew the paperwork wasn’t always being filled out, but didn’t intervene. The exec teams didn’t really care as long as results were delivered.

In this specific example, scheduled maintenance work almost delayed a plane from going back into service and rules were bent. As you might have guessed, this story didn’t end well.  The air crash investigation findings found that a maintenance process was performed incorrectly and ultimately caused the loss of everyone on board the flight. The findings went further to conclude that prevailing corporate culture was the cause of this behaviour – that it was OK to sometimes not bother with the paperwork.

For the sake of teams and customers safety, (and indeed competitive success) we can’t keep waiting for the crisis before acting. We need to realise that results-driven and process-driven organisations are not mutually exclusive. Old fashioned attitudes to process improvement need to change. The consequences to not following processes may not be as dramatic as this example for your organisation, but remember – little things add up. There’s a right way of doing things for a reason. If it’s not the best way, get involved and change it until it is.

Try a 30 day free trial of Promapp to see how you can help make sure you have simple processes for your business teams.

In Promapp's 12 year history, we're yet to come across a client with a sales team excited about spending time to improve their sales processes.

This could be due to personality types, or maybe it's the single-minded focus on achieving quota. Whatever the reason, these statistics from a recent MarketingProfs blog could well change some old-fashioned attitudes to the importance of sales processes, in particular:

1. Almost half of all sales teams don't have well defined processes in place.

2. Companies with well-defined processes are 33% more likely to be high performers.

3. Two thirds of companies that have defined their sales processes have a win rate exceeding 50%.

Try using numbers like these to capture the attention of your sales teams for process initiatives. As you can see, the right process disciplines can make a real difference to their success, not to mention your bottom line.

At a recent best practices conference in Melbourne I talked about how we're all getting used to easily accessing and navigating the information we want, whenever we want and fast.  For better or worse, instant gratification has become the world we live in - using YouTube, Google, smart phones, etc. - when we look for something we find it quickly, and it's generally a positive user experience based on really great user interface designs.

Yet some organisations continue to provide complex flowcharts and wordy procedure manuals for their business teams. The problem is, people don't have the patience to wade through a clumsily written procedure - the bar has been raised and the contrast with current day applications has simply become too great, the step down too big.

It's time to bring our information sharing out of the 90s. Our business teams deserve to find and access relevant and readable process guidance when they need it. How much do organisations spend in the pursuit of making their external communications great? Take the average corporate website and think how much time, science, effort and budget go into making it readable and usable. I know how much time, science effort and budget goes into ours and it's a lot.  We do this because we want people to understand our offering, locate the information they need, then decide if they like our way of doing things and ultimately to buy from us.

Shouldn't we apply the same level of care factor and sell factor internally, to our own people?   Furthermore, shouldn't this information be in a central repository that's living and evolving?  You Tube, Outlook, your CRM and music apps like Spotify - these are all central repositories.  Doesn't that big part of your company DNA, process and procedure, deserve to be treated with the same respect?