Business Process Considerations – Why?

Having spent over 10 years implementing business process improvements in high-tech professional services organizations, I’d like to share some of my observations, insights and experiences in a series of blog posts.

This post will cover the “Why” of business processes, i.e., list out some of the many benefits. Topics for future posts will provide answers to the traditional questions:

When should organizations consider implementing formal business processes?
What methodologies and system solutions are available?
Who should be involved?
How should you go about it?

I’d like to start with my personal definition of a “business process”: a documented and communicated repeatable set of steps that allow staff to efficiently accomplish specific tasks. That’s a lot of adjectives for such as short sentence! But these adjectives are important to the successful introduction of business processes.

If they aren’t documented, new users will struggle to learn them
If they aren’t communicated, no one will know about them
If they aren’t repeatable, then they become difficult to learn and will introduce inefficiencies as they diverge over time
They need to be defined for specific tasks in order to be effective
The key driver for the introduction of any process is efficiency

Let’s have a closer look at efficiency, which can be expanded to “a process must increase the overall efficiency of an organization”. Often when new processes are introduced, it seems like they just add more work to the team, rather than make things move more quickly. Of course, some time is needed to learn and adapt to the new process. But even after the initial ramp-up, there is typically some administrative overhead associated with it. So does the process really save time? From a close-up or short-term perspective, it may seem like it doesn’t, but the overall and long-term value has to be taken into account.

Consider the scenario where an hour of additional administration work per week means a project is successful when it would have otherwise failed, or comes in on time rather than a few weeks late, or ensures a happy customer instead of one that’s unhappy. These positive outcomes are all of high value to the organization as a whole and effectively result in greater efficiency because (in this example) the company doesn’t have to give away free services to compensate for a poor project delivery process.

Other benefits of introducing business processes include:

1. A quicker ramp-up time for new hires. The learning curve associated with starting a new job can be overwhelming, and having documented processes helps alleviate this stress.
2. The ability to adapt to changes in staffing (including short-term situations such as covering for someone on vacation). New team members have all the information they need and can continue following the same steps with minimal impact to others (including customers for project-related processes).
3. Enabling growth in the organization. Work done by individuals eventually is handled by a team. Well-defined processes and the introduction of system solutions establish a solid infrastructure for change management.
4. Predictability and improved quality control. Once a process has proven to yield better results, these results will be achieved more often.
5. Increased communication and visibility. Business processes include steps to ensure the right people are given the information they need, typically through the system implementations that support those processes.
6. Improved data and metrics. The systems that accompany business process implementations can provide a wealth of information to management and other organizations such as Sales and Marketing.
7. A framework for process improvement. The first iteration of a business process is rarely the final one, but it provides a solid foundation for iterative improvement.

Have you experienced other benefits from business processes that are not listed? Please comment and share your experiences.

I hope this has given you some new insights into why business processes are important. We’ll continue to explore this topic in my next blog post which looks at when an organization should consider implementing business processes.