As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the same can be said for most business processes. Often rushed to meet time sensitive constraints or designed without the strategic long-term planning requirements, business processes are frequently the deployed as unfinished article and rarely as efficient as they could be. Some processes have been around for so long, it almost feels too daunting a task to even consider replacing it, or you simply don’t have the time. Also, if it isn’t broke, why fix it? Well, what if improving a mundane task with automation increased efficiency and allowed you or your workforce to focus on more important and rewarding tasks? What if the very process of reviewing your business processes identified potential security risks, or allowed you to save money through implementing modern technologies? Does Business Proccess Improvement sound like something worth making the time for?
What is Business Process Improvement (BPI)?
Business Process Improvement is the practice of analysing, documenting existing processes across the organisation, and reinventing them using modern technologies and methods.
A Business Process Improvement scheme can have various goals depending on the business requirements, which may include:
- Increasing efficiency and productivity
- Improving the quality and consistency of outputs
- Enhancing the employee experience
- Meeting regulatory requirements
- Reducing costs
- Modernising the workplace
If you’re still unsure if improving your business processes is worth the time and effort, then maybe the below steps will give you the confidence and guidance needed to get started. Having a wealth of business transformation and digital transformation experience here at risual, we’ve been able to compile the below phases needed for successfully improving your business processes.
Discovery
Firstly, you need to record your existing processes via a thorough discovery exercise. This is achieved through interviewing the process owners, documenting the current “as-is” state workflows, their pros and cons, and what they would like the future “to-be” state to look like. The below points outline the key steps in the discovery phase:
- Stakeholder interviews – speak to your key stakeholders and business owners to discuss the project, benefits, and outcomes. You will need executive sponsorship through the engagement.
- Current State process maps – document the end-to-end lifecycle of each process as a workflow.
- Pain points – record the pain points and negative aspects within each workflow.
- Requirements – discuss what the process owner and end users need in the future workflow designs.
- Baseline testing and feedback surveys – record baseline tests for each process and capture the user experience to measure your future processes against.
Design
Now you know your current state, pain points, and requirements, you can start to design your future state business processes. To do so, you will need a firm understanding and knowledge of available technologies, how they integrate and how to best use the tools available and when. If you already have a solid Enterprise Architecture or technical presence within your organisation, utilise this to while redesigning your processes. If not, risual is here to help, but more on that later. Your design steps should include:
- Strategy and roadmaps – you should already have a business strategy for your IT function, but if not, you’ll need one to understand the current landscape for technology and where it is heading. This will play a big part in how the new processes are designed.
- Fit Gap analysis – record where you can and can’t complete requirements based on the available technologies in a Fit Gap.
- Automation – identify potential areas for automation.
- Governance and security – governance, compliance and security should be factored into each aspect of the future processes.
- Future State process maps – plan and design your future state workflows for each workflow via process maps.
- Documentation – it’s best practice to detail all aspects of your future state designs into some form of high-level and low-level solution design documentation.
- Sign-off – review the designs with the business process owners, and other key stakeholders to ensure they match the requirements and expectations.
Plan
So, you have your future state designs and they have been signed off by all relevant parties. Now you need to starting planning for the implementation. Planning for business process improvements is tricky to get right as inevitably there will always be some level of resistance to change within the organisation. This is where a clear and effective business change management function really shows it’s worth. Focus on the following areas to drive adoption and counteract resistance:
- Communications – start your communications campaign before the implementation start date to get your users excited about the initiatives and get them onboard with the upcoming changes.
- Training and knowledge – provide a variety of paths for training and knowledge around the new processes and potential new technologies.
- Champions and superusers – identify champions and superusers within the business who can help drive adoption and provide training and answers before users go to IT support.
- User Acceptance Testing – before rolling out to the wider audience, you should identify a pilot group to complete UAT and baseline testing of the new processes. This is your time to make tweaks to the designs, comms plans and/or training plans etc.
- Phased or big bang – decide how your implementation will play out. Will you phase the approach across teams and departments or go big bang across the whole organisation. This may be dictated by the processes themselves.
- Resources – make sure you have the right architectural, technical and project management resources throughout the project. Make sure your pilot users, champions and superusers are lined up and ready.
- Downtime or out of hours – your designs may decide this for you but consider whether you need to have downtime of an application or solution during working hours, or if the required tasks can be completed out of hours.
Implement
After drawing up your various plans and starting your communications campaigns, you can start your implementation. You should have already decided your approach during the planning phase, and so the implementation start date should have already been decided. Below are a few areas to consider for you implementation phase:
- IT Support – ensure the new processes and technologies have been transitioned to your IT support teams.
- Resistance management – expect some levels of resistance to the new processes and manage this appropriately
- Communications – keep transparent communications going throughout the implementation to ensure users are aware of what’s going on and when.
- Reporting – create reports where applicable to showcase the benefits of the new processes, or potential weaknesses.
Innovate
As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, business processes are often left unfinished or at least haven’t reached their full potential when put into use. Time and money are big factors in this, but often the main culprit is lack of innovation. Creating an innovation and feedback loop to capture new requirements can go a long way towards keeping processes modern, secure, and well governed (as well as potentially reducing costs and giving your users back more time). When considering innovation, you can look at the following areas:
- Lessons learnt – after implementing the new processes, review the lessons learnt throughout the project for future initiatives.
- Monitoring – monitor the use of the processes and technologies to find potential areas for improvement.
- Emerging technologies – monitor and review upcoming technologies and evaluate them against your processes to see if they may be viable solutions for future business process improvements.
- Feedback channels – give your users a way of providing feedback on the new processes and ideas for the future.
- Periodic reviews – meet with your champions, superusers and key stakeholders to review processes on a periodic basis.
Business Process Improvement should be a continuous cycle of these phases to ensure productivity, efficiency and the employee experience is as high as possible. As mentioned, having other mature functions within your business, like architecture and change management, increasing the success of your Business Process Improvement programme drastically. If your organisation isn’t quite at that point however, risual has the experience and skills to help. Having used this approach, and other methodologies, through our advanced business transformation and digital transformation programmes for many other clients, we have the skills, experience, and confidence to lead engagements to producing highly effective outcomes.
If you like to learn more about how risual can help you to improve you business processes, IT architecture, change management, or even assist in strategizing your future IT roadmaps, please feel free to get in touch.
