Susan Page - The Power of Business Process Improvement: 10 Simple Steps to Increase Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Adaptability

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The Power of

The Power of

To Greg...

without his encouragement and ongoing support, this book would never have happened

Have you ever had a problem that you know little or nothing about land on your desk at work? Does the problem make you feel overwhelmed and uncertain as to where to begin? Challenges like this usually occur when you already have a full workload, unrealistic deadlines, and limited resources. What can you do when you feel lost, like Hansel or Gretel trying to find the way out of the forest?

Learning to navigate through unfamiliar territory goes a long way toward easing the burden and can help you feel comfortable dealing with the unknown. Business process improvement (BPI) work, the systematic examination and improvement of administrative processes, can seem scary and overwhelming because no one teaches this navigation skill in school. But once you give it some thought, everything is a process, from making breakfast for yourself in the morning to building the space shuttle. In both cases, you follow a series of actions or steps to bring about a result. Making breakfast, no matter how informal, is still a process. You brew the coffee, cook the eggs, and toast the bread. If Vince Lombardi had run a business instead of a football team, we might remember him today for saying that process isnt everything, its the only thing.

The techniques covered in this book help smooth the path to successful BPI by clearing away the unknowns and delivering the power of process improvement directly into your hands. Whether you consider yourself an expert on the subject or do not see yourself as a process person, you will appreciate learning how to tackle process improvement work in a bottom-line, straightforward approach. For the inexperienced, The Power of Business Process Improvement guides you along a proven, step-by-step approach to a successful result; for the expert, it becomes a handy A-to-Z reference guide to help you engage an organization in a process improvement effort.

This guide cuts through the long, confusing, and difficult-to-comprehend explanations regarding BPI and takes you directly to the core of what you, the business professional, want to understand. It describes a pragmatic approach to business process improvement that I developed over the years and that anyone can use in real time to solve real problems. The ten simple steps to increasing the effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability of your business processes start with the creation of a process inventory and end with how to keep a business process continually delivering value to the business.

If you want to evaluate how your company hires employees, secures sales, or manufactures a product, examining the underlying processes helps you better understand how the business works. Every day we experience challenges with inefficient or ineffective processes, and, after you start thinking of business processes as the foundation for the business, you begin to see the power of having a process focus and wonder why you waited so long to change your perspective.

Bill Gates wrote several years ago, A rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires. This truth has not changed in all that time. We have all seen bureaucracy and red tape continually added to a business process. Bureaucracy happens not all at once but incrementally over time. A business process can easily become bloated, leading to an ineffective, inefficient, and inflexible process.

Improving business processes enables you to stay competitive and to increase your responsiveness to your customers, the productivity of your employees doing the work, and your companys return on investment. The expertise to examine and understand how business processes work sets you apart from the rest because you have the power to demonstrate the value that the process delivers, its importance to your company, and the effect that a single change can produce.

People become interested in process improvement for any number of reasons. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

If you encountered one or more of these experiences, then BPI can help. It improves your ability to meet your customers needs, helps you eliminate errors, identifies opportunities to yield a more effective and efficient process, assists you in learning the end-to-end process for a new part of the business, makes clear the relationship between departments and the roles and responsibilities of each, improves your organizations productivity, and eliminates redundancy.

Working on business processes helps demystify the process and makes a seemingly complex process less intimidating. Process improvement work also gives you the chance to engage a cross-functional team in the work so that everyone can learn the end-to-end business process, instead of simply focusing on his or her own piece of the process. You will find that, as you do the work, few employees understand the end-to-end process. Employees may understand their own piece but not how the entire process works from beginning to end. When a team works together on improving business processes, the work itself provides a means for colleagues to talk about common topics, and the team effort promotes an understanding of the interconnectivity of the work.