How to Implement New Business Processes Without Affecting Productivity Levels

A business process is basically a collection of related tasks aimed at product or service delivery. It comprises a set of activities with specific goals and objectives targeted at value-addition in an organization. I believe you sometimes implement new business processes in your entity so as to produce more, cheaper, better, quicker and generally offer more service, don't you? At the same time, you desire to implement these new processes without retarding productivity. Isn't it so? Sometimes these two appear to be conflicting. What must you do to reconcile the two? How do you implement new business processes without affecting productivity level? Let's consider some options.

- As a starting point, good people management approaches are vital. You should understand that implementing new business processes is part of change and hence change management guidelines should be considered. Don't you think so? For example, you should ensure that there is effective communication of the new processes and various implementation aspects. Psychological readiness and buy-in by the people are important. Additionally you need to empower, involve, engage and motivate your people.

- Training your people in advance is another powerful approach to implement new business processes without adversely affecting workplace productivity. Do you appreciate the value of this approach? Without advance training and orientation you will have an uphill task. But when your people learn the new approaches before their implementation, your chance of success is very high. Won't you be glad to achieve this?

- It is said that practice makes perfect. In fact perfect practice makes perfect. Practical learning methods such as work simulation, test runs, parallel runs etc help prepare people and the organization at large. Following such methods will ensure that productivity will not lag behind once you start implementing the new business processes.

- Project management approaches such as the critical path approach can additionally guide you in focusing on the critical aspects of implementing the new processes. This approach enables you to identify and place emphasis on the critical areas of change. If these critical areas are adequately handled, your process implementation most likely will not adversely affect productivity.

- The gradual and incremental approach to new processes implementation also avoids negative impact on productivity. Don't you think so? While speedy execution is desired in organizational change processes, the gradual alternative has its advantages also. Surely you don't desire speed to totally disrupt productivity and hence business continuity while implementing change. Now, why not try a slower approach?

- What about the aspect of leadership? You need strong leaders to ensure sustenance of organizational productivity while implementing change. You need capable and good leadership to monitor the change process so that productivity does not drop. Don't you agree with me on this? Just try effecting change in an organization without competent leadership, then you will appreciate the point I'm making here. Can your leaders and managers reconcile change management and high productivity?

In conclusion, productivity is extremely vital in your organization. It affects your strategic and tactical plans, staff motivation, pricing, investment analysis etc. While implementing change in your entity, you need not forget productivity. Of course your organization will keep on changing over time. The smart approach is this - you should change for the better and without destroying the good in the past. Why not consider this in your next change assignment? You can certainly improve your business processes without reducing productivity.

Think Business Processes Not Departments

1. Process Thinking follows the natural flow of the business

A business process is a collection of interrelated work tasks triggered by an event and geared towards providing results or outcomes valued by the "customer". The adoption of process thinking causes an organisation to align its activities and systems with the natural flow of materials and information from the start to the end of the value chain.

Functional thinking creates silos with boundaries across which information and other resource flows are not seamless, leading to the absence of a shared understanding of what the business is about, what factors are critical to the achievement of objectives and how efforts can be coordinated to best attain those objectives.

Carry out an experiment in your organisation. Take any core process: ask five managers in different departments involved in the process the following questions.

• Describe this process
• Who are the customers to the process?
• What valued outcomes do they expect?
• Who are the suppliers to the process?
• What inputs do they provide?
• What is the cycle time for this process?

If yours is a functionally oriented organisation, their answers, where they understand your questions at all, are likely to be all different. Some processes you might consider are order processing, product development, recruitment etc.

2. Business Process Thinking focuses the organisation on customer needs

Because of the insistence on definite identifiable outcomes valued by the customer, process thinking helps the organisation focus on correctly identifying and satisfactorily meeting and exceeding their expectations. Measures of performance are tied to current customer satisfaction levels as well as the enhancement of capacity to satisfy the customer in the future.

Departmental or functional thinking is, on the other hand, focused on internal measures of no value to the customer. Examples of the different kinds of measures are input measures (e.g. items delivered by suppliers), process measures (e.g. cost, time, involvement, efficiency) and output (e.g. timeliness, quality, ease of use, returns on investment) measures. Decisions on appropriate measures must meet the dual requirements of value to the customer and improvability.

3. Business Process Thinking Encourages Focus on Value Addition

Organisations that have adopted a business process mentality constantly strive to ensure that certainly all their processes, and as much as possible, all activities within those processes contribute towards the final outcome paid for by the customer. All non-value adding processes and activities are eliminated or minimised.

Many functionally oriented organisations for example have lengthy approval requirements that serve no purpose. A company drastically collapsed its approval chain after an experiment in which unsuspecting approvers failed to detect that the documents they had just endorsed only had the usual cover sheet followed by a sheaf of blank sheets. This meant they were approving requests without reading the contents! Talk about non-value addition!

Consider also that in many processes the actual contact time between a process document or work piece and the workers or process operators is usually a ridiculously small fraction of the process cycle time. The balance of the time is wasted on such non-value activities as waiting, unnecessary movement, locating misplaced items or documents etc.

4. Business Process Thinking Encourages a Focus on Quality

The bane of good quality products or services in majority of organisations is the variation or inconsistency of process outcomes. Organisations with a process mentality continuously ferret out and eliminate sources of variation to achieve consistent results. This is almost impossible to achieve within functionally oriented organisations as their narrow focus prevents awareness of the causes of problems that span functional boundaries.

While a functional organisation might call for an arbitrary amount of improvement in quality (e.g. 10% reduction in defects) process oriented organisations apply a fact-based understanding of the relationship between results and the processes that drive them. Statistical tools are used to study what factors have the most significant impact and effort is focused on influencing these factors.

5. Business Process Thinking Institutionalises High Performance and Guarantees Execution of Organisational Priorities

A focus on business processes institutionalises high performance in the following ways.

• Uses measures of performance that are meaningful to the customer and other stakeholders. This is very important in view of the axiom that what gets measured gets done. Rewards are aligned to measures, which in turn support valued customer and organisational outcomes.
• Standardises processes by minimising waste and variation, drastically reducing defects and improving speed of delivery.