Why Improving a Process Is Essential To Success

Posted by James on February 5, 2012 in Leadership Development with No Comments Yet

Use This 7 Step Method When Improving a Process for Optimal Results

Improving a process may seem simple on the surface to some. I have seen and coached many who think of improving a process and in the end actually made the process worse. The truth of the matter is improving a process is a process within itself. You must go into process improvement with that mindset. Having a sound strategy on how to improve a process will set you up for success, however you also need to be flexible that your upfront method may not be the most sound method. In this post I am going to cover a 7 step process improvement method in the book 4th Generation Management. Improving a process or processes has been a strength of mine for the past several years and I believe everyone should have a go to method to improving a process. So keep on reading to learn the 7 step method…

Improving a Process Starts With This…

Process improvement really hinges on a few fundamental pieces. One of those pieces is having the keen insight to ask the right questions. Right questions leads to making the right links. Making the right links will ultimately lead you to get to the deep true causes of the problem or problems at hand. Having a framework or a method will all but ensure that you will be able to ask those questions that lead into the other crucial questions in which will truly make a change for the better. Here is the 7 step method:

Step #1 – Identify the purpose. It always needs to start here. If you don’t know what the aim or purpose is in your business, process, career, etc how can you improve the process around it? The answer is you can’t. Identifying the purpose of what you will do will allow you shape a narrow target which in turn will funnel into the other steps of improving a process.

Step #2 – What Is The Current Situation? This step must allow brutal honesty. When improving a process you must look at the current situation, but you also need to look at the history that brought you to current situation. If the current situation is optimal, there is no need for improvement. However when improving a process there have been actions and in-actions that led to a broken system. Allowing for brutal honesty will open up the truth of the current situation and bring the truest reality into the light no matter how hard it may be.

Step #3 – Cause Analysis. Cause analysis will help you verify the causes in which brought the current situation through reliable data. This is where you find the evidence versus assumptions. Chasing assumptions never really pans out effectively in the end. however, getting reliable evidence around the causes and being able to be confident in the evidence is a must do here. This step really helps you narrow your focus for improving a process.

Step #4 – Solutions. After getting the cause(s) verified by data the next step is to look at the solutions that will help improve the process with sustainability. This is where you will unpack the pros and cons of each solution, how you will test them to see which solutions have the most positive impact, and how to ramp up the best solutions to have the largest impact.

Step #5 – Results. Step 5 is all about looking at the results from the solutions that were approved and implemented. Once you have results that are returning positive impact you are on the right path. If you simply implement solutions and never track their impact and results what good is it? Improving a process does not happen unless there are results.

Step #6 – Standardization. Now that there are positive results that are returning a positive impact you should seek to standardize the process. This is all about sustainability, if you can’t standardize your processes how can improving a process over the long term happen? In short, it won’t. Having documentation, roles and responsibilities, impact measurements, and so on will help the sustainability of the new process. Standardize the process and lean it out as much as possible so there is little room for ambiguity.

Step #7 – Future Plans. Improving a process takes having a vision. You need to seek if there were any areas missed, key learning metrics, and how you can improve a process that was outside of this scope. Ultimately, it should end in celebration of how you and the team went through improving a process and captured that very thing.

Closing Thoughts On Improving a Process

There are many different tactics, strategies, methods, and so on when improving a process. Finding the one that fits well with your strengths and weaknesses is a must do. Even with the diverse methods for improving a process they all have commonality between them. All of them identify the purpose, seek to understand the current situation, look for evidence to corroborate their findings, and put a plan in place that will allow the process is run optimally. Improving a process can be as simple as your morning routine, or as complex leaning out a company. Leaders need to always be looking at how to improve processes. If they don’t they run the risk of allowing broken systems and outdated practices to thrive. How do you currently go about improving a process?