The Best Way to Improve Business Processes
By
Ed Fenwick
Senior Vice President
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:
