Continuous Improvement: Reduce the Risk and Get Ahead of the Crisis
In business there are no excuses for wasting money - no good ones anyway. Ignorance is the favourite bedfellow of inefficiency. Just because you can't see the bottlenecks, doesn't mean they aren't there.
Professionals often only look at process management tools when they are confronted with this problem:
'I see clearly that there is a business problem but I can't quite put my finger on what it is'
or...
'I can see clearly that one of our processes is breaking down but I can't identify why'
'The company is losing money and we really need to change the way we do things!'
The problem with all three scenarios is that they all exist within a crisis situation because when you can't see a problem, you're less inclined to think that you have a problem and who wants to spend their time chasing phantoms?
However, the principles of continuous improvement imply that things could always get better and more efficient because there are no perfect businesses where efficiency is concerned, only perfect efficiency intentions.
So whether you do need a quick fix for your process problems or just need to get a little bit more efficiency in your industry - this article will help you find the solution, even if you don't know exactlly what you are looking for.
To Know Your Business Processes is to Improve Them
It is not at all easy to understand your business processes if you don’t know what they are and it is nigh on impossible to improve business processes if you don’t know what they are.
With that in mind, I am going to explain what to do when you want to improve processes...even if you don't know what they are.
Business process improvement in the real world
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.
The problem with rushing change
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.
For more on this please read the article:
Business Process Improvement: Understanding the Impact of Change
Capturing business processes
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.
It is all in the planning
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.
The improvement cycle
This way it will be possible to go through the full improvement cycle of:
- Capturing and understanding the relevant business processes
- Sharing the current business processes with all relevant parties
- Using the discussion of these current business processes as a forum to capture improvement ideas
- Modelling the various improvement ideas to decide the optimal one
- Implementing the improvement
…to achieve systematic process improvement in a time frame which keeps everyone on-board – including senior management.
The University of Winchester
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:
- Always beginning with a clear objective
- The current process (AS-IS) is captured using the Triaster process mapping tool
- The mapped process is published to their Process Library where it is reviewed and approved
- Bottlenecks are highlighted
- Options for alternative processes are identified and analysed and the future (To-Be) process is modelled. This may incorporate for example the use of new technology or perhaps just a few small changes
- An Action plan for implementation is formulated
- The project team presents the proposed process to management and colleagues
- The new process is agreed and implemented
- Short follow-up events are typically held at 15, 30, 60, 90 days and at one year to embed the new process as business as usual and review the return on investment.
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.
How to transform your business processes, before you know what they are
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.
Are you wanting to transform your business processes?
Continuous Improvement is a long road that involves making that first decision to understand your processes. If you want to know how the University of Winchester were able to change their culture, improve their processes and procedures and win two BQF UK Excellence Awards, read their case study now...