By: Sue Ebbers, Ph.D.
In the simplest conceptual terms, performance improvement professionals believe companies are systems with a stackable structure, like building blocks. Each of the different pieces, parts, departments and divisions influence and support each other in various ways. Because of this, we see misaligned or missing building blocks as a threat to the entire operation’s effectiveness, reducing the quality of outputs, including products and services.
But if you can identify the compromised block or blocks that are causing lower quality in the system, then you can accurately address the deficit to reaching target quality. Start by examining any damaging business assumptions, then follow this easy 6-step, evidence-based process to quantify current and desired results, and the gaps that exist between each. Next, analyze why these gaps exist and finally address the issues with a workable solution.
This will enable you to make targeted changes to your system, based on quantifiable data, and achieve actual business process improvement that leads to the desired business or organizational outcomes.
Why You Don’t Need Business Process Improvement
Business owners and organizational leaders juggle many competing priorities every day, year-in and year-out. So why would you even want to consider business process improvement, especially if everything seems to be going fine? The fact is that you may not need to, especially if your sales teams are hitting their revenue targets, customer satisfaction rates are healthy, and you have a strong workforce recruitment and retention track record.
However, change and crisis are inevitable. Generational employee turnover, new pandemics, global supply chain disruptions, inflation, technology security, and other unforeseen challenges are just a few of the more recent issues companies large and small have had to tackle to survive. These new realities are daunting, and can deeply strain the relationship between a company and its most important resource: its people. Unfortunately, this makes a knee-jerk reaction towards the seemingly obvious solution very attractive. But nothing is that easy. Instead, knee-jerk reactions are often costly, wasteful, and most importantly, ineffective, as they attack the symptom(s) of the problem and not the root cause(s).
The better way to ensure continued success is to shore up your business processes. Instead of pursuing a short-sighted, deceptively easy fix, consider initiating this 6-step, data-driven process:
Determine all gaps in current and desired results; then
Identify the gaps that matter the most; then
Analyze why these gaps exist; then
Determine essential solution criteria; then
Build a solution that closes these gaps in results; and finally
Test the new process to verify effectiveness
It isn’t as elaborate as brain surgery, but working through the process does require organization, diligence, and follow-through from you. The effort requires you to break processes down into very small pieces so you can build an effective solution that is based on more than a whim. Remember to be patient with the process, because it is tedious. But in the end, you’ll have the data-backed confidence your solution will work in both the short-term and the long-term, because it is aligned bottom to top with business results.
The common method for quantifying the gap is the performance of a needs assessment. And the first step is to determine the current performance gaps.
Step 1. Determine Current Performance Gaps
Determining performance gaps requires two points of measure: the current results (baseline) and the desired results (target). However, if you have an incomplete picture of company’s true structure and miss information about how the parts work together in real time, then you cannot accurately identify gaps.
So the fastest, most efficient, and most accessible way to get started is by creating a detailed flow chart of your organization. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but make sure you have lots of space to work, because there will be exhaustive detail. From the outputs all the way back to the inputs, we will chart how everything relates through these 6-7 levels of your organization.
List the services and products your company delivers to customers and clients
Start with the outputs on your flow chart, because these are what you are exchanging for revenue. Make sure the list is accurate and thorough. Because if items are missing, key contributing sources of performance deficit will not be discernible.
List the main sections of your organization
This is the start of how you model current workforce alignment to results. The sections that you add will include any of the following or even others: your sales, customer service, manufacturing, accounting/finance, operations, technical, and executive teams. Every company is different, so clearly distinguish each organizational group that is separate from the others. Combined, these groups constitute the translation of everything your company or organization delivers to its customer base.
Next, draw arrows in alignment with parts of the organization and its activities that lead to the products or services that each team helps deliver. Be sure to not miss any key contributors. Otherwise, as you are exploring the cause of the problem you want to resolve, you may miss something like a team lead who has greater influence on the production process than their title would typically denote. Or you might miss an often-repeated customer interaction with a previously unexpected part of the organization who does not have a stake in the current process. These things are easy to overlook, so be careful and thorough.. It should not surprise you if nearly all sections or departments in your organization are involved in ways large and small with all of the company’s products and services.
For each of these outputs, list the current result you are achieving for each business or organization output (# of sales, # of satisfied customers, # of complaints, # of repairs, trends over time, etc.).
List the sub-sections under each section
These are the groups or parts of each section of the company that deliver a part of the final service or product. They may be distinguished by physical location, reporting structure, P&L entity, or however your organization treats them. But as we have encouraged repeatedly, make sure to include all pieces.
Continue to list the current results for each sub-section and how it links to the results achieved at the output level.
Align sub-processes under each sub-section of the organization
Continue visualizing the workforce alignment in your flow chart from sub-section to sub-process. Add sub-processes under each sub-section and then draw arrows that connect them to the related sections of the organization. Remember that in order to fix a process, you have to fully understand how a process works, down to the smallest detail. By aligning sub-processes to sub-sections, you are able to see how everything actually works together as a system, because there is always some kind of linear connection. It’s a visual/proximity thing.
Break down the sub-processes into smaller sub-processes, if relevant
You want to get these functioning parts down to their simplest form so that more steps can be added. Breaking all processes and sub-processes down to down to their simplest forms also helps to uncover patterns across the sections of the organization under analysis. Once you can identify patterns, you will be able to address systemic challenges in multiple locations simultaneously. After all, if the same input, process, or activity is happening in multiple places within the organization, you can prioritize solutions so they address multiple areas. You can then build higher business performance improvement return on the investment.
List the steps in each of the smallest sub-processes
In most large organizations, there can be many levels nested under each output. You know when you are at the bottom of the organizational structure when you have only inputs (sourced ingredients, machinery, tools, instructions, people, baseline processes, etc.) At this point, you’ve almost completely visualized the system through your flowchart. By adding the inputs and baseline processes for each sub-process, you are helping ensure all efforts to transform inputs throughout your organization into outputs that drive revenue are captured. Besides clarity and accuracy, you are ensuring in a training needs assessment that when someone needs to be trained on resolving the problem, there aren’t any tasks missing that will cause their work to create inconsistent results due to it being a flawed portrayal of all processes. This step also helps you to know all of the inputs that will be involved.
List the inputs
Again, by understanding all the inputs that apply to a given sub-process step, such as raw materials, instructions, machinery, technology, human labor, equipment, budgets and other influencing factors, you will now have a baseline on what is happening and what should be happening. Then you can see whether a raw material meets certain specifications, and if not, how it is causing quality issues in the end product or service – the organization’s output to its customers.
Step 2. Rank And Prioritize The Performance Gaps
Now that you have a clear idea of the current state of the business, it’s time to identify gaps. Beginning at the top and going down throughout all levels of the organization, make sure you have listed all current results for each client/customer product or service. For each current result, list the results you would optimally want to see happen. For example:
With outputs, you might identify the current and desired sales volume for each item.
With the main sections of the organization, you may want to look at who is misaligned to the outputs and indicate the correction.
With the sub-sections, you might identify redundancy or low performers, by notating what they should be doing instead of what they currently are.
With sub-processes, you might look at what’s not working and what is.
With steps, you might look where further clarity is needed or additional information will enable work to be performed more consistently.
Finally with inputs, you might focus on finding sources of waste and finding the risk inherent to different input choices.
After you have the current state, and now the desired state, compare what you have with what you want. Notate and quantify your company’s gaps in performance. These are where your problems lie.
Next, rank the gaps according to their impact on operations, especially related to product quality and customer satisfaction. This ranking of the gaps will allow you to tackle the most important items first, and achieve the greatest return based on cost/benefit ratios. For instance, imagine you have two problems with customer service, such as:
incorrect product information communication, compared to
incorrect product availability communication.
Now ask, which of these will cause the highest risk? Consider costs for shipping, re-stocking, lawsuits, distribution details, and loss of a customer (or multiple customers). Some examples of results we want to improve may include:
the customer service satisfaction survey response rate (customer communication),
the top-line sales volume compared to the product returns volume (customer sentiment),
the employee length of service time compared to their sales targets or overall volume (staff competency),
or even the safety log on an assembly line for similar injuries suffered (process variance).
After you have answered those questions and ranked the gaps in business performance, it’s time to identify contributing factors through careful research.
Step 3. Find The Source(s) Of The Gaps
You can’t know everything about everything, so it is necessary to enlist some help when you conduct the research phase of this business process improvement initiative. Gathering a broad spectrum of feedback from obvious and not so obvious sources is the fastest way to uncover why these interconnected gaps in results in your flow chart are occurring.
By understanding why the gaps are occurring, you can better find out what is the source and then address it through the correct solution. Remember that the “what” (gaps in results) is the problem...the “why” isn’t the cause of the problem.
InITIAL RESEARCH
Your initial research will yield for you potentially important information regarding the challenged process. It can also give you greater insight in how processes actually work in the various layers of the organization. Information to review may include such documentation as:
Sales reports
Communications from all levels of the organization regarding a relevant topic
Training materials
Quarterly reports
Work instructions and quality procedures
Items flagged as being non-conforming during internal audits
Interviews
Start by interviewing relevant internal and external individuals who can provide useful insight from the front lines. This can take place in person, over the phone, or even by video conference. Prepare your questions ahead of time so that you can make most effective use of the time together. And try to hold the interviews separately from other interviewees, so that one individual’s feedback doesn’t bias or influence another’s. Lastly, promise anonymity to all interviewees, and ensure that that anonymity is kept.
Questions you can ask can include, for example:
What is your contribution to this process? Why is it important?
Do you perceive that others like you are performing as needed on this process?
How do you interface with other parts of the organization?
What are the communication challenges? What are the challenges that keep the process from being optimal?
Take time to analyze this critical information, enabling you to discern patterns and key information about which you’ll want to learn more in your focus group sessions.
Focus Groups
Conduct focus groups next with groups of individuals who represent different parts of the process, as well as those who know how the entire process works. This includes key stakeholders, individuals performing the job, and others who perform tasks related to the challenged process. In contrast to individual interviews, these group discussions are useful for sparking ideas or recollection from individuals involved that they wouldn’t remember otherwise. Just be sure to observe unspoken behaviors or reactions to follow-up on individually, if there seems to be some discomfort with airing concerns in the group format.
Documentation Review
This type of research is a continuation of what was performed above, but at a deeper level. When reviewing documentation, you are looking for consistency with what has been shared by the interviews and focus groups. There might be practices that are widespread, but that are wholly missing from official work instructions or policies. You might find out there is no documentation for specific parts of a process, which makes it easy to identify the cause of performance variance. Or maybe there is outdated, duplicate, or conflicting documentation that could be contributing to employee confusion. Seeing everything in black and white can really help clarify things across the board.
Specification Review
One especially critical document to review are the product or service specifications. When were they last updated? Do you have full confidence they are correct? Has a part number, material, or supplier changed? Is there any implicit bias present in training content or presentation mode, that limits people with accessibility needs? Consider auditing the specifications from front to back so you can ensure there aren’t hidden inaccuracies buried within causing greater problems down the line.
Surveys
Also explore and confirm the findings with a survey to a broader group of relevant individuals. Make sure they aren’t the same folks who participated in the interviews and focus groups so that you have comparative results. And keep the questions simple, relevant and straight-to-the-point so that you avoid people quitting the survey before finishing. Just be careful about adding participation incentives to increase feedback, because it can bias who responds.
Step 4. Determine The Essential Solution Criteria
You have gathered a lot of information in order to determine what the causal factors are related to a challenged process or processes within your organizational system. Now it is time to begin to craft a solution to the root causes of the system’s inconsistencies.
Determining the causal factors now leads to the identification of essential solution criteria. Based on what you know, what are the specific factors and elements that must be integrated into the solution for it to work optimally? These items are your essential solution criteria, which help to address the problem in great detail. Here is an example:
Let’s imagine you have a sales force with expert salespeople. These salespeople are selling well and making your organization a lot of money. As they age out and retire, or move on to other roles, you find that the beginning salespeople who replace them aren’t nearly as effective. You try creating a learning and mentoring system on your own, thinking the remaining experts will help the new team members emulate top performance. But it doesn’t work. And instead, because of seemingly different generational dynamics, more of both groups are now leaving due to a combination of dissatisfaction and feeling that they aren’t maximizing their potential. So you are effectively worse off than you were before.
One essential solution criteria could be that the new sales force members must be effective in their roles within 90 days of hire as demonstrated by actual sales numbers. Another could be that turnaround time for product repairs be a maximum of one week, rather than the current three or four weeks. Keep in mind that there could be 10+ criteria that inform the best solution to address the business performance improvement need. By considering all information and breaking down all processes and sub-processes related to the achievement of the end result, you can then identify the specific factors that should be integrated into the solution can be so that it will work optimally.
Step 5. Develop Formal Implementation Plan
Once you have all of your essential solution criteria identified, it’s time to develop your solution(s) and integrate them into business processes. There are both simple and complex portions to this. New vernacular may need to be adopted across multiple systems so that team members aren’t confused. Workspace configuration may need to be completely overhauled, because actual job tasks required for certain positions aren’t sufficiently supported by the current arrangement. Staffing organizational reporting structures may have to also change. Needless to say, the implementation isn’t as easy as the formulation, so it is best not to just dive into it.
Instead, develop a formal implementation plan in which all essential solution criteria are integrated into the new processes. You have already determined what needs to change, and where it needs to happen. So now you should set the change goal dates, identify your advocates and change champions in each respective area, ensure change doesn’t interrupt business operations, and start your pilot.
6. Test the new process(es).
Running a pilot of the implementation across a limited learning audience can provide you with valuable, scalable insight. Should it be with one department first? One team first? Across several multi-functional teams like purchasing and accounting? During a recurring table-top learning and development training experience? After everyone is ready to go and the pilot phase is started, don’t forget to gather performance data. This will allow you to determine what must be tweaked before delivering the ultimate solution enterprise-wide.
In the period between pilot and full implementation, consider conducting a change management campaign to develop the full readiness of all parties impacted by this change. Because of the nature of their function, team members, or place in the organization, one group may do just fine during the pilot phase… while another has much more difficulty when they begin to implement process changes beyond the pilot phase.
Related Articles For Further Reading
Correctly Understanding Learning Context To Enable Lasting Organizational Change
Use The 5 Stages Of Readiness For Change Management Results
How To Complete A Job Task Analysis (JT/A) For Your Workforce
Ready to dive into business process improvement for your organization?
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