So why write an article on how to do so?
Well actually, it isn’t. This is however an article on what to do, when you are tasked with improving your business processes, before you know what they are.
In the real world, the one that we all live in, once an area of your business or organisation is identified as having a problem – it needs fixing. And it needs fixing quickly.
Senior management want to see an action plan. They want reports, they want charts, they want results.
However, if you don’t understand the area of the business with the problem, you can’t start to think about the best ways to improve it.
In fact it can be very damaging to just rush in and start changing things, when you don’t really understand why they are done that way. Things can easily be made worse when you can’t assess the impact of a change, before it is made.
In addition, it is impossible to quantify any improvement when you don’t know what the start point was.
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For more on this please read the article:
Business Process Improvement: Understanding the Impact of Change
So, in fact there is no way to systematically improve your business processes before understanding what they are.
I hope that isn’t too disappointing.
However, it is perfectly possible to apply a vigorous business process improvement approach and deliver to the timeframes required by senior management and real life.
The way to reduce the time taken to deliver improvements is to be very focused in the scope of the projects.
In other words, rather than cutting stages out of the improvement approach, keep the focus of the improvement as narrow as possible.
This way it will be possible to go through the full improvement cycle of:
…to achieve systematic process improvement in a time frame which keeps everyone on-board – including senior management.
The Continuous Improvement team at the University of Winchester have applied this approach extremely successfully. They focus in on areas needing improvement, such as student enrolment, and achieve great improvement in a relatively short period of time. For example their student enrolment process was streamlined from 4 days to 25 minutes.
Achieving these ‘wins’ has delivered on-going cost savings to the University which have been re-invested in service provision.
Their improvement approach is vigorous – as set out below – but because it's focused and delivering frequent positive results, it's very well received by the senior management team of the university.
This is the Process improvement approach taken by the Continuous Improvement Team at the University of Winchester:
It has also resulted in the University of Winchester being awarded both the BQF Sustainable future Award 2016 and the Overall UK Excellence Award 2016 – which has certain pleased the Vice-Chancellor
“This award means everything to us and reflects a journey that we have been on for over a decade. Continuous improvement is important to any organisation and working with the EFQM model brings so many benefits, helping you to improve – no matter how good you already are.” Professor Joy Carter DL, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Winchester.
So, whilst you can’t transform your business processes before you know what they are, you can improve business processes on a timescale that would seem to suggest that you have.
We hope that you have found this article both interesting an informative. Triaster deliver a business process management system which supports a continual improvement approach. If you would like to learn more about this, please click here to learn about our Capture, Share, Use and Improve approach to continual improvement, or click on one of the buttons below:
Business Process Improvement: Understanding the Impact of Change
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