Keeping your Process Optimized and Teams Productive can seem impossible. Let's change that. Process Optimization 101:
1. Basic Terms & Concepts
2. Common roadblocks in keeping business process optimized
2. Lets change that: Process Optimization 101
3. The DO's
4. The DON'Ts
Basic Terms and Concepts
What are business process?
Any set of activities that when taken together, transform a series of inputs into an output, producing a value.
Process vs Workflows:
Process and Workflow are ways to explain how work gets done, and often used interchangeably.
Processes and Workflows are just different sides of the coin, with different purposes.
Popular process improvement frameworks and methodologies
Organizations use a variety of process improvement methodologies. Each accommodate a different need. A good tool should adopt to any framework you are using in your organization.
Common roadblocks in keeping business process optimized
It is very hard to do without a proper tool and proper mind set. Three main pain points:
1. Being able to identify and agree on what to improve is a big hurdle in organizations
2. The tools organizations use today are disparate and disjointed, making it difficult to streamline communication and collaboration
3. The human factors and change management of business processes are critical to success, yet often overlooked
Lets change that: Native ServiceNow Process Optimization
The act of optimizing a process is also a process. It works like this:
The DO's
Auto discover and Analyze the Process
It is nearly impossible to keep an up to date version of a process when you are running multiple interconnected workflows. Use Process Optimization toolkit to discover your ServiceNow process with push of a button, and aid in effective collaboration and communication.
Best practice: Identify the needs by a combination of tops-down and bottoms-up efforts, and outside influences.
Implement the change
Once improvements and automation opportunities are identified, the “to be” process change is planned out. The improvement could be related to a process change, coaching/training opportunity, process step elimination, automate manual steps, or replace/modernize the tools.
Best practice:
- When undertaking process improvement, do not ignore the human element of change management
- Change can cause employees to feel threatened – efforts must be made to make everyone understand that rationale behind the effort and the outcomes/improvements sought
- Projects are more successful when change management is addressed frontally in a proactive manner to assure all of those affected
Monitor and Evaluate
Setting the correct metrics early in the process is critical, while also providing the flexibility to adjust as needed.
Best practices:
- Key Performance Indices are set early in the process; many as far back as the needs identification
- Focus on the leading indicators, rather than lagging indicators in order to detect trouble before it is too late to make needed adjustments
- Revisiting the goals and key metrics throughout the process is critical to a successful implementation
The DON'Ts
1. Do not work in silos. The human factors and change management of business processes are critical to success. If it makes sense, adopt a center of excellence for Optimization and Automation.
2. Not defining the success/acceptance criteria. Make sure the toolset provides an inbuilt capabilities to track, quantify and benchmarks the optimization benefits.
3. Do not completely rely on one approach. Process insights are hidden in different touch-points between process and human interaction. Start small and slowly expand in to full process intelligence journey.
Process Optimization: Free Trial Available
Keep Optimizing, everyday!
- Manjeet
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