Every time you introduce change to an organization, challenges can arise. Business Process Improvement (BPI) is no different. Whenever a process changes, you can expect someone to reject it! So what are the different challenges you may face and how can you overcome them?
1. Prioritization of work: When there are multiple opportunities, you may find it difficult to identify the biggest opportunity. On NBC The big loser, You can easily see who has the biggest problem! You can accomplish the same with business processes by creating a Process prioritization matrix.
Combine your list, or inventory, of processes and prioritization criteria in a single worksheet, using the rows to list the business processes and the columns to list the criteria. If you don’t have established criteria to help you prioritize, identify a few with the impact, current state, and value of existing processes in mind as a starting point. Begin your improvement efforts with the highest scoring process.
2. Prevent the scope from slipping: Once you start working on a single business process, you can easily deviate from the original focus of the work. Have you ever started a project at home and then found out that one thing leads to another? This happens all the time in BPI’s work because new ideas, demands, and needs arise as you enter the job, and the temptation is to continually expand the scope of a BPI effort.
Before you start working on business process improvement, establish a foundation for your work. Similar to building a house, where the foundation supports the weight of the entire structure, the process “Flat“will help you avoid scope slippage. While you can do this in a number of ways, I find it helpful to create a one-page document that includes, at a minimum:
- a description of the process that anyone can understand
- the process boundaries (where the process begins and ends)
- the client and their needs
- a list of measures of success
3. Involve people: In the perfect world, you have sponsorship for BPI, but this does not always exist. Colleagues may not see “what I get from this” or you may not have a culture of improvement in your organization.
Employees must “own” the process improvement to achieve sustained success because that’s where the ENERGY business process improvement lies! Until everyone in an organization sees BPI as part of their normal daily responsibilities, process improvement will always come and go.
While managers clearly have a role (they are also employees), their responsibility lies in creating the environment for process improvement. However, the problem with this idea is that many managers got to where they are today because of their ability to generate results as individual contributors.
All managers should include BPI in their annual performance plan and have part of their year-end review focused on their achievements in this area. However, they cannot see the BPI as an “event” that they can flag, it is a process, like anything else!
4. Handling difficult people: During any BPI endeavor, you will find someone you probably wish would “go away.” You may wonder why they resist change or show negative behavior.
You should discover the fountain of your colleague’s concern. Forget about BPI for a minute and try to identify what the person values and then match BPI earnings to those values. For example, if a colleague values job security, then you should show him how BPI will allow him to keep his job, perhaps by doing more value-added work. Once you match the results with the values, you can overcome almost any challenge.
5. Change of priorities: As new management enters an organization, priorities can change. So how can you focus on BPI?
The key is to stay focused on the client. If a new manager comes in who only seems to care about the bottom line, take the time to explicitly link “BPI,” “customers,” and the “bottom line.” Only customers contribute to a company’s profits and they keep this concept at the center of everything they do.
6. Criticizing your technical improvement: Sometimes colleagues prefer to use a different improvement method than the one you chose. You may be faced with the dilemma of which one has the best reputation on your computer. Is it Lean, Six Sigma, Reengineering, Lean Six Sigma or something else?
In reality, most enhancement techniques boil down to “quality. “All the techniques have the same goal: to achieve improvements in the delivery of a product or service to the customer, and they all have a connection to the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement. While the various techniques have some differences, you will see more. similarities not differences You should feel free to take the best of several techniques, combine them, and select a name that works for your organization.
Copyright 2011 Susan Page
