I took a long weekend last week, and returning to work on Monday found an email in my inbox from a colleague who is venturing into the BPM waters. Needless to say I ignored it until I’d gone through the rest of my inbox.

Then I came back to it. “How do we sustain improvement practice in our section?” Of course we need to - we are all still aiming for the nirvana of business processes that are actively managed and continually-improved, aren’t we?

Here are some options I’ve put forward. What would you recommend?

1. 1.Measure measure measure.
   

This is an area where we both aren’t very good and have  the capacity to become very good.

If we capture measures of the effectiveness and efficiency of our processes and monitor them over time we can identify activities whose variation changes these measures & standardise activities to optimise our measures.

A very highly-recommended resource is Stacey Barr, her newsletters & articles at http://www.staceybarr.com

2. 2.Apply Process Improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma, Lean, TQM, CMMI, ... that guide process improvement activities
   

These have a lot of potential but also potentially require a lot of effort to start & continue. The Six Sigma methodology is similar to what I’ve described in (1), define metrics that measure quality of any processes that contribute to outcomes & work toward reducing variation in these measures. Lean is about identifying & removing different types of waste in your processes, and I think is a very useful framework to guide process analysis - “what do we currently do that doesn’t add value?”.

3. 3.Forget the frameworks and use the wisdom of crowds
   

Toyota, in addition to having led the world in process improvement methodologies (often being held up as examples of what we’re trying to attain with lean & six sigma), have developed an organisational culture where all staff are expected and empowered to improve business processes. They receive millions of employee suggestions every year, and (so I was told) around 40% of these suggestions are implemented, at least for a time. With employees knowing that they’re able to influence & improve all facets of the organisation (including influencing the nature of their work) people actually spend time thinking about how to do things better - And who knows better than people involved in the process what doesn’t work well and how it might be improved?

This option really excites me, I think it has a lot of potential if we can move past the cliché of ‘suggestion boxes’ and move toward a culture that strives for change and improvement.

And while changing culture is probably the most challenging option to pursue, I think it is going to be the one that best stands the test of time (provided it’s done successfully).