Process Mapping, Process Improvement, and Process Management

A Practical Guide to Enhancing Work and Information Flow

Dan Madison

• Publisher: Paton Professional
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781932828047
• eBook ISBN: 9781932828047
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

This bestselling book on process mapping, process improvement, and process management will help you transform your organization into a world-class competitor. Author Dan Madison explains the evolution of work management styles, from traditional to process-focused, and introduces the tools of process mapping, the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the organization, and a logical ten-step redesign methodology. Thirty-eight design principles allow readers to custom-fit the methodology to the particular challenges within their own organizations. Additional chapters by guest writers Jerry Talley, Ph.D., and Vic Walling, Ph.D., discuss cross-department process management and using computer simulation in redesign, respectively. Inside you'll find detailed, illustrated discussions about:

• The importance of process
• Process mapping
• Key stakeholders' roles and responsibilities
• The ten-step process redesign methodology
• Process improvement and creating the process team
• The four lenses of analysis
• Customer report cards, benchmarking, and best practices
• Process redesign case studies
• Design principles for process redesign
• Barriers to process redesign
• Becoming a process-focused organization
• Building cross-department process management
• Using information technology in process management

Chapter 1

The Importance of Process

Every day each one of us works in or interacts with a process. At work, we prepare documents, deliver reports, and attend meetings; away from work, we shop, plan vacations, and arrange meals. All of these activities are processes. Often we don’t notice the process because it runs smoothly. However, when things don’t go as planned, we want to know what happened, triggering the need for process analysis.

Processes are important because:

• They’re a major component of organizations.

• A process-focused organization can use process analysis to diagnose all types of problems (e.g., structure, controls, people, and processes).

• Most organizational problems have their root cause in a process.

• Organizations can manage work much more effectively and efficiently through a process mindset.

Each of these concepts is discussed in more detail in the following sections.

What Are Organizations?

Organizations comprise four elements:

• People

• Processes

• Control mechanisms

• Structure

The people element refers to roles and responsibilities, skills, training, motivation, capability, and job fit. In many organizations when something goes wrong, people blame co-workers because they believe most problems are somehow people-related. But what about problems with the other organizational elements? Let’s look at them each in turn.

What does a process mean, exactly? It can be defined it in three ways:

• A group of activities that leads to some output or result.

• The means by which work gets done.

• A mechanism to create and deliver value to a customer.

The two main processes in any organization are workflow and information flow. In 1992 the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) compiled a process classification framework (PFC). It’s exceedingly helpful in defining processes within organizations without having to be industry-specific. The APQC’s PFC is included in Appendix B.

Control mechanisms exist for all processes. Sometimes they’re quite visible; at other times, they’re not. In manufacturing processes, controls generally are electrical, mechanical, and/or statistical in nature, such as gages and measurement devices. In service processes, controls are usually the people, or their supervisors, who work in the process. Included with these controls are the beliefs and assumptions of the key players.

Controls can include behavioral prods such as rewards for desirable actions or penalties for undesirable ones. Corporate policy and business rules are controls. In addition, software rules control activities and information flow. Finally, measurement and feedback systems are controls as well.

Control mechanisms are important in process management because any big change in a process will require a change to the existing controls. If they’re not changed, the process will begin to revert back to how it was. Recall, for example, a time when you or a co-worker had a great idea for improving something only to have a manager say, “That won’t work.” Here, the manager’s skepticism is the control mechanism that impedes making a change to a process.

Controls often have “slack” in them that allows incremental changes to a process without triggering the control mechanism. Continuous process improvement techniques can be quite successful because often there’s no need to change a control when changing a process.

The structure of an organization refers to its chart of departments, reporting relationships, and span of control.

Thus, organizations consist of people working in processes that have control mechanisms, all of which are placed into an organizational structure.

An effective entry point to find problems in an organization is through processes. By using the four lenses of analysis—i.e., frustration, quality, time, and cost—discussed in Chapter 7, we can identify problems not only with processes but also with people, control mechanisms, and structure. Process analysis produces a wonderful diagnostic on what works and what doesn’t.

Where Do Most Organizational Problems Originate?

Process-thinking pundits claim that 85 percent of all problems can be attributed to processes. The remaining 15 percent falls into the people category. I’d like to modify that slightly: 85 percent of all organizational problems fall into process, control mechanisms, and structure, with the bulk of that in process.

An interesting dynamic takes place in organizations where managers blame people for problems: The people being blamed will use a series of defensive routines to deflect the criticism. Often, they’ll blame someone else or another department. Consequently, problems imbedded in a process don’t get fixed, and it’s more than likely that they’ll reoccur. The blame dynamic creates a vicious cycle with little chance of really solving the problem.

Thus, when a problem arises, the most effective plan of action is to examine the process in detail using the four lenses of analysis. If the problem isn’t a process issue, you should still be able to locate the root cause by using the four lenses.

The root causes of organizational problems can be categorized as:

• Problems with process, control mechanisms, and structure: 85 percent

• Problems with people: 15 percent

The Five Styles of Work Management

When my associate Jerry Talley and I looked at how organizations manage work, five distinct management styles emerged. Organizations tend to move logically from one style to the next because the preceding style sets the stage for the one following. Moving from one style to the next requires a developmental transition. For this reason it’s difficult to skip a step.

Also, each step in the transition is an evolutionary advancement in how effective an organization can be. The thinking, tool sets, and methodologies of each style allow an organization to improve in quality, cost reduction, service delivery, and customer satisfaction. Each time an organization moves to the next management style, the rewards accelerate.

The transition from one style to the next is preceded by a belief change or experiences that cause management to think differently. When this change takes hold, it sets the stage for a new way to manage work.

When these management styles were benchmarked against the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners of 2000 to see if their transitions match the theory of work management, the Baldrige winners stated that the five styles we defined mirrored their own journeys. Following is a discussion of each style.

Traditional Work Management

The first style of work management is called “traditional.” Figure 1.1 shows a diagram of a typical organization chart. At the top is the president, to whom a variety of departments report. Within each department the authority is hierarchical, with the department head at the top, then the manager, supervisor, and, finally, the worker.

In a traditional organization, the “brains” are represented by everyone in a management position, while the “arms and legs” are those at the worker level. When something goes wrong, the immediate response is to find the guilty party. Management in traditional organizations attributes most problems to people. You hear comments such as, “They weren’t trained”; “They didn’t follow procedures”; “It was a poor job fit”; “They weren’t motivated”; and “They lacked the skills.”

Another aspect of the traditional organization is lack of trust. Workers don’t trust management, and management doesn’t trust workers. Lack of trust exists between departments as well. Finger-pointing and blaming between departments can be quite common.

In traditional organizations, problems get fixed in a variety of ways. One of the most popular is to do something about the people because it’s commonly believed that almost all problems are somehow people-related. For this reason, training is a popular approach. When a problem comes up, someone is usually quick to rush to a training solution.

Another people approach is to change responsibilities through organizational restructuring. Man...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• About the Author