- Process is King
- Measure early and often
- Focus on the end-to-end
- Redesign without crippling the business
- Challenge every activity in the ideal process model
- Strategy sets the direction, Process implements it. – Keep in mind throughout your effort that Process is King and should drive all other changes (organization changes and technology changes). Don’t let personalities or existing technology constraints dilute your “ideal” solution. Create the “ideal” process and then overlay reality to see if you need to scale back your solution; don’t cast the ideal with the constraints of current organization or current technology.
- Measure like voting in Chicago….early and often. Time invested early in the effort to quantify current metrics and establish measurements if they don’t currently exist will take the guess work out of measuring post-implementation success.
- Be sure to focus on the end-to-end process and eliminate the tendency to define the current state focused on people or functions – you may gather the facts by function, but identify all the touch points before and after that function so that you can create an end-to-end view (i.e., initial input through to value-created output). True optimization will be difficult, if not impossible without doing this.
- Redesign is not synonymous with “cripple the day-to-day business while you implement a new idea”.
- Think strategically about your redesign initiative so strategy and implementation can be done during a timeframe that keeps in mind business cycles, seasonal peaks or critical processing times when possible.
- Challenge every activity in the “ideal” process model to validate its need to be there. After defining the “future-state” operating model, test every activity making sure every, and I mean every activity/step does at least one of the following:
- Increases the value to the customer
- Improves quality of the product
- Is a regulatory requirement
If it doesn’t meet one of these criteria, the activity or step should not be in the new operating model.
Keep these tips in mind to help improve your probability for success in your optimization initiatives.