Particularly in this economy, the need to reduce costs is more important than ever.  There are several questions that help address the decisions about where to make changes:

• If you are experiencing reductions in your workforce, aren't you still trying to maintain the level of service to your customers and clients? 
• If your processes aren't optimized, have you seen rework and delays that frustrate not only the customers but also your employees?
• Are your processes producing excessive and costly waste?

You can impact each of these areas of your organization by taking a process perspective.  Consider the definition of a process that focuses on completing a series of steps, one after the other, to create an end result, such as a product or service.  Taken from this view, a process can include, for example, conducting a meeting, manufacturing a product, offering a service to a customer or patient care in a healthcare setting, producing a report, or many other examples.  Examples of waste, rework, and delays are easy to think of: How many times have you been part of a meeting with no end result, one that had numerous people talking at once, no focused purpose, and left you and others feeling frustrated and unsatisfied or confused about what course of action to take at the conclusion of the meeting?  The measures of hours and cost of such meetings has been documented at astonishing levels.
Process improvement follows some general and specific steps:

• Choose a process to focus on. 
• Articulate the steps of the process in their logical order.
• Look at the steps and assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the process.  In other words, examine to what extent the steps of the process are impacted by rework and other delays.  Taken as a portion of the process cost, these efficiency and effectiveness measures can help you determine the significance of the impact on the process.
• Use the assessments of process efficiency and effectiveness to point you in the direction of where to develop and implement solutions to the problems.  For example, suppose you find that an ineffective meeting is impacting the time, energy, and productivity of 10 people and ultimately wasting 10 - 20 hours that could be far better spent.  This is not an uncommon example. 

What are you waiting for?  Why not take some steps to improve your processes? 

Improving State Government one process at a time can have significant impact on internal customer processes.  Just such a project was undertaken by the State of Maine Office of Information Technology (OIT) during Summer 2008 to improve their Procurement process. OIT serves a customer base of approximately 13,000 State of Maine Government employees and has a procurement process for consulting and other services, software, and hardware.  Well-known feedback about the lack of timeliness from order to receipt of the goods or services has been the cause of aggravation, frustration, inefficiencies, and excessive delays and costs.  OIT undertook a very successful process mapping and redesign project that was completed in less than 10 days, and resulted in an improvement action plan that is now being implemented. The initial data gathering phase of the project used activity-based costing which accelerated the project and resulted in completion in far less time than is typical.  Here is yet another example of how successful process improvement can be in a focused area with leadership in place to support the implementation of improvements. 

It has a significant place…that of conductor, servant leader, and guiding light, as well as intervener and counselor.

Facilitation in group and individual settings has produced startlingly impactful results in situations where one might have thought the breakdowns in communication or relationships or leadership behaviors would have brought the organization onto its knees.  In fact, figuratively, often that has already happened. 

Don’t choose just any facilitator.  It takes rare insight, creativity, reflecting in action, quickness, patience and tolerance, faith, and confidence to take a group (or individuals) through an emotionally challenging place where hurt and fear have likely already set in and related defensiveness, anger, disappointment, and other difficult emotions have filled the room and situation.  Good facilitation can pull this apart strand by strand until participants feel safe to speak up, cared about, and willing to enter into an unfolding discussion about what is wrong in the meeting, company, the department, or between groups of people or between individuals.  Left unchecked, these problems can keep people from working together effectively and compromise the quality of work life significantly. Addressed, these issues can impact process improvement efforts significantly in a positive way.

Don’t assume the problems will go away by themselves!  They often only get worse and pit people against each other, inhibit otherwise productive and enjoyable meetings, and make the emotional environment  sometimes so painful that no one wants to participate anymore in the original objectives.

Just look for that rare and great facilitator.  They are not ordinary people.  They have unusual courage, honesty, and insight; highly developed communication skills, and a very good sense of humor.  They will make you laugh, they will take you places mentally and emotionally in relation to the work situation, that you never thought possible.  They will help to change the outcomes to a better situation.  You will often find the experience to be amazing and inspiring.  Give it a chance if you or your group is in trouble!

 

Much is written about the connection between activity-based costing (ABC) and process improvement.  Some of it is elusive and hard to incorporate into a practical approach to improving an organization.  As a tool for process improvement, ABC is a fabulous asset that offers a significant approach to finding out what’s wrong in the processes of an organization.  A common application of ABC is for the analysis of overhead.  An alternative, less frequently used, application is to use it to analyze the activities of the process itself. 

In this approach, there are several specific steps:
• Determine what the top 6 – 10 activities of a job function are.
• Estimate the percentage of time spent on each activity. 
• Then, ask additional questions about the extent of rework and the extent to which the worker has everything that is needed to complete the specific activity. 
• Next, develop additional specific questions that can be asked at the level of the activity. 
• Marry this quantifiable information with the cost of the process measured by the combination of salary, benefits, and overhead attributed to the job function. 
• Summarize totals by department, business unit, or any appropriate cluster. 

The immediate result is an assessment of the extent of rework and delays at the level of the activity as a percentage of the total process cost.  This information is a fabulously effective tool for determining where to fix the process, since fixing the areas of highest rework and delays will put labor dollars back into productive endeavors rather than leaving them generating the waste of rework. 

Usually, organizations are unequipped internally to conduct a thorough and rapidly useful process evaluation, process analysis, or process improvement initiative.  They aren’t prepared to implement improvement actions to achieve the results that will actually improve the process and the resulting bottom line.  It takes courage and work and more than a little process improvement subject matter expertise.  That’s why the field of process improvement has evolved, and there are plenty of well qualified consultant experts who make this their life work and can facilitate your initiatives using activity-based costing or other approaches.  Just look for them.

In many ways, the 1970’s work of W. Edwards Deming in the American auto industry is still ahead of our best thinking today.  At one consulting visit that I was fortunate enough to accompany him on, we sat in a meeting with union leaders at the headquarters of General Motors.  Deming and I were seated at a Boardroom table large enough to seat more than twenty.  The chairs against the walls of the room were filled with numbers of UAW leaders.  Deming said to them, “You have a job that no one else can do.  You have to hold management responsible for making improvements.” 

He was saying many things in those words about quality improvement, process improvement, organizational development, and other concepts essential to improving the competitive position of organizations.  He was speaking these things in 1986, and they ring equally as true in 2009.

• Management must lead the way in desire and opportunity for improvement. 
• Management must have the courage to look at rework, delays, and other sources of inefficiency and ineffectiveness. 
• Management must have the boldness to do something to improve what is found lacking. 
• Management must attend to the issues of people and communication, relationships, and leadership behaviors. 
• Management must make the opportunity to facilitate group and individual sessions that uncover the barriers to improvement. 

Deming used words that were a bit different, but his meaning was the same.  

The consulting arena has cultivated vast expertise in helping organizations with all of these challenges.  There is no lack of qualified and superb experts who are extraordinary resources in the ways of process improvement, facilitation, relationship and communication management, and leadership development.  They can significantly save an organization from failure and can help to bring the bright light of process and quality improvement into the organization as a guide.  You need only search to find the right help!