Feb 24 2008
Continuous Improvement With Business Process Management
My February has been very busy with travel and work, which is why I haven’t posted anything this entire month. My travels and workload are calming down so I figured I would take this opportunity on a lazy Sunday to get something out on the site. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I am a slacker. 
I started off February in Asia, and my last post discussed the benefits of Cebu as a BPO Destination in the Philippines. I went to Central America the following week to visit facilities in Guatemala; we were impressed with the infrastructure and have started discussions to acquire some Spanish services for our business. After my travels, I have spent the last two weeks getting our team’s 2008 goals aligned, presenting project plans and financial goals to executive management and obtaining buy-in that we are going to accomplish great things throughout the year! The workload is heavy; we have approximately twenty projects to deliver by year-end. As always, I am confident we will come in on time and within budget.
One of the biggest things that we are going to accomplish this year is improvement upon our call abatement strategy, customer self-service and customer retention while also building upon our existing service experience for our customers. When looking at all these projects, it occurred to me that there is an extremely heavy focus on the discipline of Business Process Management. That being said, we instituted a paradigm to manage this discipline by leveraging the core principles of process design and improvement.
Business process management is a common term that means different things to different people. For me, I find this to be a simple core component of an organization and sum it up as the constant improvement of the foundational and ancillary processes that govern the business functions. The goals are to measure the success of processes to keep the ‘trend your friend’ (trend moves Up and to the Right) and demonstrate constant and continuous improvement. In turn, constant improvement drives down operational costs, which will land you in the ‘circle of trust’ (can’t resist, sorry…I liked Robert Dinero’s character in Meet the Parents…a lot).
There are many ‘best-practices’ for managing business process. Within my team, we have implemented a lot of six-sigma methodology to measure our success and improve how we operate. The idea with six-sigma is that you quantify improvement through statistical analysis. It has helped us a great deal on many levels; especially with our quality program. We have also adapted some of Microsoft’s approach to business process management and use this methodology to model our process design today.
- Model & Design
- Develop & Deploy
- Manage & Interact
- Analyze & Optimize
By adopting six-sigma principles and Microsoft principles, our business has and will continue to improve immensely. In my opinion, our business process efforts will improve the following for 2008:
- Increase Customer Retention
- Reduce Operational Costs
- Improve Regulatory/Compliance Objectives
- Improve Efficiencies Across Organizational Boundaries
- Enable Reuse
- Greater Employee and Personal Satisfaction
- Reduce Risk
- Agile Work Environment
I hope this post satiates all of you for now. My apologies again for taking so long to get something out on the site, but my real job and family take priority. Maybe I will develop a process to improve my available time for the website. I think this would be the hardest goal to conquer all year.
Managing a business process or a cluster of them surely requires a very systematic, quantitative and patient approach. The sought after end result is definitely profitability and to ensure that any process (be it a new one or an existing one) that you are charged to manage is profitable is to guarantee it delivers standard, complaint and efficient output.
The best way (by me) to go about it is:
Standardize and Document every step with defined Service Levels using the 9 step BPMS.
Once standardized continually challenge and innovate using Six Sigma management approach.
Keep It Simple Stupid!!! No really… that is the best process there is today. Too many companies have over complicated their continous improvement efforts by bringing in TQM methodologies, then we’ll call it Lean, but wait what about Six Sigma, but we’re also ISO, and don’t forget about the ultimate nastiness - SOX!!!
By the time your done, it’s no wonder that the troupes are tired, management is confused, and nothing gets implemented. Not to mention that you’ve spent countless dollars on flavor-of-the-month implementations of each mehtodology…
The best way to manage your business processes is a simple, staged implementation. Begin with the end in mind… relate each of your processes according to the customer lifecycle, and make a fairly simple map of your organization. Then ask yourself: what are my base requirements in terms of SOX compliance and ISO? Gather detail your requirements… the entire time try to make your SOX documentation, training, etc match up to whats needed for ISO compliance and vice versa.
Then you can add on the bells and whistles… but prioritize according to a simple criticality matrix.
The main theme is understand how your organization relates to the client, understand what is most important, then utilize and leverage each of the methodologies for each other… not against.
Oh and GO SLOW!!! It’s a change of culture more than anything and those take a while to change.