Perfecting the Process
of Process Improvement
Five Tips to Help You Navigate
the Path to Process Excellence
ADDRESSING THE
PROCESS-IMPROVEMENT IMPERATIVE
Whether you’re trying to keep up with agile new competitors, looking
to cut costs across your organization, or just needing to stay on top of
increasing regulations, process improvement is your key to success.
Lots of companies are jumping head first into new process-improvement
projects, taking the low-hanging fruit and hoping they deliver the
outcomes they’re looking for. But what many organizations fail to realize
is that process improvement is a process in itself, and whatever you want
to achieve, it’s probably the one process you should try to perfect first.
Reaching true process excellence is a journey, and every step you
take will teach you something new, but here are five key tips we think
everyone should know before they get started.
1 MAINTAIN TOTAL VISIBILITY
Visibility is critical at every stage of process improvement—from being able to understand
what’s happening in your business and identify the very best opportunities for improvement,
to measuring the results of your efforts when you’re done.
Ensuring you have complete visibility over
every moving part of your business and your
process-improvement efforts is the first step
toward process excellence. It helps keep
everybody on task, enables you to stay on top
of a huge number of simultaneous projects,
and helps fuel continuous improvement
through output and results monitoring.
What you’re looking for is a single source
of truth for all process-improvement project
information—one place where any stakeholder
can look to find out what’s going on, what
needs to happen next, and what effects
it’s having on the business.
With total visibility of your complete process
environment and process-improvement
efforts, you can:
• Keep track of every single project across
disparate functions and departments
• Give all stakeholders access to all
of the information they need to ensure
their efforts achieve the desired outcomes
• Go beyond just picking the low-hanging
fruit and really dig into the processes that
you need to improve
• Track the outcomes of your
process-improvement efforts and
monitor your progress toward process
excellence
2 ASSESS AND SELECT THE BEST IDEAS ACROSS YOUR ENTERPRISE
The concept of process improvement is so broad that one of the biggest challenges can often
be simply deciding where you should start and what you should do. Everybody has their own
opinions on which processes are in greatest need of improvement, and evaluating each and
every idea is a critical step in moving toward process excellence.
While C-level decision-makers have a good
overview of what’s going on in the business
and where broad changes are needed most,
it’s those who are actually engaging with
processes at the ground level who may have
the best ideas and most practical input for
improving them.
Similarly, it might not even be internal
stakeholders who have the best view of your
processes. Suppliers, customers, and other
external groups may have their own ideas for
how your processes could be changed, and
social platforms are making it easier than ever
for them to share their input with you.
If you want to achieve process excellence,
you’re going to need to listen to everybody,
and find a way to effectively evaluate their
ideas and prioritize your improvement efforts
in line with their input.
3 GET AND MAINTAIN EXECUTIVE BUY-IN
A big part of any major new business strategy or change program is getting executive
buy-in. If you want the C-suite on your side, you’re going to have to demonstrate your plans,
your intentions, and the predicted benefits for the business in a way they clearly understand.
When you submit your process change
plans for executive consideration, you
need to be able to show:
• Why the process is worth improving,
and why you’ve selected it for
improvement
• How you intend to improve it, and how
much investment will be involved
• What your desired outcomes are for
the project
• When you feasibly see the project
being completed
• The overall impact that your efforts
will have on the business
But securing senior executive support is just
the beginning—you’re also going to need to
keep it. That means making sure they can
constantly see what you’re doing, and keeping
track of process-improvement progress to
ensure the project is proceeding as briefed.
They’ll also be interested in tracking your
progress toward process excellence. Finding
a way to give senior executives visibility of
your process-improvement project portfolio is
critical if you want to keep them on your side
and reassure them that every step you take
is the right one for your business’s future.
4 ALIGN PROCESS CHANGE WITH BUSINESS STRATEGY
Process improvement isn’t solely about making big changes; it’s also about making lots
of small and necessary ones. Because of that, it’s often easy to lose sight of where each
individual improvement fits into the big picture.
If you want your efforts to be successful,
you’ve got to align every project with your
business’s strategic goals. You can spend
hundreds of hours improving internal
efficiency, but if your biggest success factor
is delivering stronger, more satisfying
customer experiences, your efforts may miss
the mark no matter how well they’re executed.
Business strategy needs to be top of mind
right from the beginning of your journey to
process excellence. You should think about
every proposed improvement in terms of how
it will help you achieve your strategic goals.
Once you’re confident that the projects you’re
moving forward with can help you achieve
those goals, the next step is keeping a close
eye on them to ensure they deliver the
intended outcomes.
Even if you start out with the best intentions,
process-improvement projects with lots of
moving parts can quickly go off plan if your
people don’t have the tools required to
manage them properly.
5 SELECT THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB
To help achieve all of these goals, you’re going to need the right technology behind you.
To achieve process excellence, you need
a platform that can help you:
• Gain complete visibility of both
process-improvement opportunities,
and all process-improvement projects
that are in progress
• Collate and evaluate all ideas and
opportunities for future improvement
projects
• Demonstrate the value of those
projects as concepts, and continue
to track their value both as they’re
being changed, and after completion
• Ensure all projects in progress remain
aligned to the business goals that they
were created to help achieve
• Give everyone a fast, simple overview
of all process-improvement efforts
happening across the business, with
a clear view of where they all fit into
the big picture
To get all of this in a single platform, many
organizations are turning toward project
portfolio management (PPM) platforms.
PPM technology is designed to help
businesses keep track of huge numbers of
complex projects and manage all of them
from a single plane of glass.
The problem is, with generic PPM solutions,
you only gain generic capabilities—and
process-change projects can be very different
than the sort of large, capital-intensive projects
for which most PPM solutions are designed.
Learn more
INTRODUCING ORACLE’S INSTANTIS
ENTERPRISETRACK
If you’re planning your journey to
process excellence, visit our website
oracle.com/goto/Instantis or talk
to us today. Find out how Oracle’s
Instantis EnterpriseTrack can help
you get there faster, and deliver
predictable results that are aligned
with your business strategy.
Oracle’s Instantis EnterpriseTrack is a different breed of PPM solution.
It’s designed for change projects, so it doesn’t end when the project is
completed. Instead, it enables you to keep tracking the results of your
projects (helping you see the real impact of process improvements)
and make a stronger business case for your next project.
It provides a simple, clear overview of all change projects happening
within your organization. And because it’s deployed in the cloud,
it’s extremely easy for you to give total project visibility to every
stakeholder who needs it.
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