Mark Braham, MSc, CQI, FCQI discusses the Process Approach

Editor's note: this transcript was generated by AI and has been lightly edited for clarity and relevance — some sections have been shortened or removed, and minor transcription errors corrected.

Full transcript

00:00:00Giles

Hello, and welcome to our webinar on the Process Approach and how taking a process approach makes organisations more effective and efficient. I'm delighted to welcome Mark Braham, who was involved in the drafting of ISO 9001:2015, and he's here to talk about it today.

00:00:39Mark Braham

The process approach is a set of interrelated and interacting activities that use inputs to deliver the intended results. Or, more simply: a bunch of steps you need to do to get stuff done.

00:01:07Mark Braham

The process approach was originally designed to get people to document what they do and how they do it, and it was never designed to be cumbersome or confusing.

00:01:42Giles

So it's kind of like bottling the magic that makes a company work well.

00:01:47Mark Braham

Yeah, absolutely. And it puts some element of resilience in there — you have turnover of staff, and it's a good training tool. You can do inductions with the processes. If someone comes across a problem they've not experienced, they can look at the process, follow it through, and it should be easy to follow.

00:02:10Giles

When should a company start thinking about implementing the process approach?

00:02:16Mark Braham

Day one, as a startup — log your processes so you know they're repeatable and consistent, and if something doesn't work, you can investigate why.

00:02:43Mark Braham

Every company has four core processes: your employee journey, your customer journey, your supplier or subcontract journey, and the project journey — the ad hoc process for everything else. Once you understand where you start and finish, you start looking at high-risk activities, bottlenecks, and where you can save money and gain efficiencies. People can actually see the process working, or not, and then look for efficiencies and effectiveness.

00:04:45Mark Braham

The output isn't just about effectiveness or efficiency — it's about whether it reduces cost, reduces the resources committed, and whether you can simplify things. I think you can only do that when you can visualise it in a process map.

00:05:24Mark Braham

The first thing is to select what you want to process map, and base that on data — management by fact, not a hunch. Go for something that's going to really add value to the operation.

00:05:48Mark Braham

Get the right people in the room. If you don't have the right people in the room, you can produce as many processes as you want and they will not work.

00:06:10Mark Braham

Don't always chase the money. If you chase the money, you'll be looking at the pounds at the end of the process rather than delivering a quality service. I'm a fond believer: deliver quality first, and the savings will follow.

00:07:06Giles

So the idea that improving quality is the overall aim of all of this.

00:07:06Mark Braham

Absolutely. If you can improve the quality, you'll improve the effectiveness, you'll improve the efficiencies, and your process capability should go up.

00:07:32Mark Braham

Identify the processes you want to do — you cannot do the whole organisation in one go. Break it up like a pizza, one slice at a time. Be data-driven on where you go first. If you attempt to do it all, you won't complete it.

00:08:01Mark Braham

Secondly, go digital. Paper's dead. With process mapping, digital tools, it's exactly the same as comparing a person thinking a few steps ahead in chess to a computer thinking a thousand steps ahead. And with the introduction of AI over the top of that now, it's getting quicker, easier, faster, and a lot of the work is done for you.

00:10:01Mark Braham

If you don't get the levels right — I regard it as three P's. Policy is a statement of intent and your boundaries. Process is what we do, at a high level. Procedures are how you do it. I like to hang procedures off processes, and training manuals off the procedures, so it's all linked in.

00:11:19Giles

Once you have the process approach working, how do you maintain or improve upon it?

00:11:19Mark Braham

Every process should have a review cycle depending on the type of thing. Base it on risk. Get quality circles up and running, get the stakeholders involved. You're now looking for efficiencies — how can we make it slicker, faster, quicker?

00:13:44Giles

So Triaster is one of those providers. We provide something called the Process Library. Can you describe how you used it and why it helped?

00:14:02Mark Braham

We decided to implement it at the Automobile Association. We were using SharePoint at the time, and there was a huge amount of documentation — about 7,200 documents. There was a habit of creating new documentation for different parts of the business, and we'd end up with two, three, maybe four very similar processes that weren't quite the same. This became very burdensome to manage, so we knew we had to go to a different digital solution.

00:14:34Mark Braham

We wanted a solution that gave us change control. The built-in RACI matrix was quite important — we could really pin down the owners of different processes and put them into a change control process. The efficiencies were definitely made: we knocked 7,200 documents down to 4,000. Took us about 12 months, but we took out a lot of waste.

00:15:28Giles

Were there any particular features of the Process Library that would be important for someone looking to enable the process approach?

00:15:39Mark Braham

The metadata in the background — RACI, and risk, which was quite significant, and the way you can link that through. When you wanted to look at the organisation as a whole, you could produce a map of all the processes, very transparent to everybody. Word search was quite useful too — people started to realise they were using a process a lot, and could log it as a favourite.

00:16:33Mark Braham

Using your own motto, isn't it — useful, usable, and used. We used that internally because it was important in creating those processes. Stop creating it if it doesn't hit those three U's.

00:16:46Giles

Any advice for people looking for such a system, as part of their business case?

00:17:01Mark Braham

The supplier has to be almost in partnership with individuals — you cannot have an us-and-them relationship. Start off with writing what you need, and go through the process yourself: test it, trial it, get some experience with it. And most importantly right now is the mobile capability of it — it's got to be at the fingertips for remote workers.

00:18:43Mark Braham

It's about functionality, about ease of use, and they will come back for more. Having a simple feedback button on every process page, you get loads of good quality data coming back, which you probably wouldn't even find in an audit.

00:19:16Mark Braham

If you keep true to yourself and simplify everything you do, break down complex ideas into smaller steps, and keep it consistent throughout the management system, it will land a lot better with the end users.