Some Common Process Improvement Themes

Common Process Improvement Themes

Some Common Process Improvement Themes

Common Process Improvement Themes

[dt_sc_h1]Some Common Process Improvement Themes[/dt_sc_h1]

While organizations are struggling to build the six sigma and lean culture within their organizations – they are constantly under pressure from their customers to improve upon the metrics they are accountable for.

As a matter of fact organizations have had to sign a yearly productivity improvement target of 10% or their like in the Master Task Order (MTO) or Statement of Work (SOW) or MSA etc.

Hence it became imperative for leaders to develop theme buckets for improvement within their organization. The commonly used themes are:

1) Doing more for less

People, systems, process are supposed to get better, more efficient etc with gain of experience. Customers expect the same from us if they have outsourced some process to us. They expect that the productivity of our employee will improve as they gain experience of the process and the IT Infra being used.

2) Bottom Quartile Management

This is scientifically proven fact that if we focus on bottom quartile performers and if we are able to improve their performance by even a small proportion then we may realize huge improvement in bottom-line revenue.

3) Asset Re-use

Creating re-usability in assets is a very critical part of organizational growth. In Software development business creating re-usable codes and test cases are extremely critical to making more profit. Similarly, the standardization of templates, formats, Checklists, training materials which are re-usable make a lot of sense. We should not be required to re-invent the wheel every time.

4) Mistake Proofing

Several business processes suffer at the hands of deficiency of preceding business process/processes. While attending to issues, one must do root cause analysis and see if the contributing factors may be mistake proofed. Such things ensure that the processes get the required inputs which are right the first time. And such improvement will at the end contribute to improving productivity of business processes.

5) Digitization

Several manual processes can be made more efficient by taking out manual work and replacing them with digitized work flow. However one must be careful and implement lean in the process before they digitize.

6) Knowledge Management or IP Retention

Knowledge or best practices or lesson learn documentation at several places helps improve systems. Known Error Database (KEDB) usage in IT Support is a common example of the same.

Building FAQs, documented SOPs, Work Instructions etc serve as a good measure in the same.