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The Best Way to Improve
Business Processes
A question we
often hear as we meet prospective new clients is "What's Nolan's
view on the best way to improve business processes?" We have been
doing this long enough to know that this is often a backhanded way
of asking, "Do you guys specialize in the 'fad of the day' approach
to process improvement?" While the "fad of the day" has changed over
the years to include Reengineering, Total Quality Management (TQM),
Value Analysis, Six Sigma, and Lean, our answer has remained the
same: the best way to improve business processes depends on your
objectives.
Each of the
process improvement fads mentioned above brought several improvement
capabilities forward. Reengineering gave us the "clean sheet of
paper" concept that has yielded many innovative transformations of
processes. TQM put the customer center stage by improving processes
to standards that were important to the customer. Value Analysis
took a different approach depending on where the process segment
fell in the Importance-Reliability-Cost matrix. Six Sigma helped
organizations gain statistical control of their processes to reduce
or eliminate errors. Last but not least, Lean is helping businesses
remove waste and improve flow. Add to this list of highly publicized
approaches, a few we have developed and deployed, such as
Strategy-Driven Process Design, which starts with setting the
strategy and guiding principles and designing or redesigning to
them. All of these are really good things.
The problem is that we rarely come across an improvement
effort with such a narrow and singular focus. When we ask, "What are
you trying to improve?" the answer is usually more complex than any
one of the focused approaches can handle. Thus, the approach will
have to be a blend of techniques to achieve the desired result.
Often the drive for a specific process improvement
methodology is connected with an attempt to build an internal
consulting capability. Building it around a specific methodology can
be appealing for a number of reasons—training is readily available;
there are books, seminars, and videos galore. Also, building a new
capability that people are reading about in the business press or
hearing about at conferences has image value. However, in our
experience, internal capabilities built around a singular
methodology rarely last past the fad stage for exactly the same
reason we deploy customized approaches. Internal groups are as
unlikely as we are to find simple, single-focus problems that can be
solved with a single approach.
So, we think the answer to the question "What's the best way
to improve business processes?" is this:
- Understand what needs to be improved—what are the desired
business outcomes?
- Have a working knowledge and experience with a broad range of
improvement methodologies.
- Build a custom approach based on needs.
This approach
is your best path to producing meaningful, balanced, and durable
process improvement results. |
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