Think "Business Processes" Not "Departments" - 5 Compelling ReasonsLearn Management Articles on management-info.biz. Think "Business Processes" Not "Departments" - 5 Compelling Reasons article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
A business process is a collection of interrelated work tasks triggered by an event and geared towards providing results or outcomes valued by the 'customer'. The adoption of process thinking causes an organisation to align its activities and systems with the natural flow of materials and information from the start to the end of the value chain. Functional thinking creates silos with boundaries across which information and other resource flows are not seamless, leading to the absence of a shared understanding of what the business is about, what factors are critical to the achievement of objectives and how efforts can be coordinated to best attain those objectives. Carry out an experiment in your organisation. Take any core process: ask five managers in different departments involved in the process the following questions.
* Describe this process If yours is a functionally oriented organisation, their answers, where they understand your questions at all, are likely to be all different. Some processes you might consider are order processing, product development, recruitment etc. 2. Business Process Thinking focuses the organisation on customer needs Because of the insistence on definite identifiable outcomes valued by the customer, process thinking helps the organisation focus on correctly identifying and satisfactorily meeting and exceeding their expectations. Measures of performance are tied to current customer satisfaction levels as well as the enhancement of capacity to satisfy the customer in the future. Departmental or functional thinking is, on the other hand, focused on internal measures of no value to the customer. Examples of the different kinds of measures are input measures (e.g. items delivered by suppliers), process measures (e.g. cost, time, involvement, efficiency) and output (e.g. timeliness, quality, ease of use, returns on investment) measures. Decisions on appropriate measures must meet the dual requirements of value to the customer and improvability. 3. Business Process Thinking Encourages Focus on Value Addition Organisations that have adopted a business process mentality constantly strive to ensure that certainly all their processes, and as much as possible, all activities within those processes contribute towards the final outcome paid for by the customer. All non-value adding processes and activities are eliminated or minimised. Many functionally oriented organisations for example have lengthy approval requirements that serve no purpose. A company drastically collapsed its approval chain after an experiment in which unsuspecting approvers failed to detect that the documents they had just endorsed only had the usual cover sheet followed by a sheaf of blank sheets. This meant they were approving requests without reading the contents! Talk about non-value addition! Consider also that in many processes the actual contact time between a process document or work piece and the workers or process operators is usually a ridiculously small fraction of the process cycle time. The balance of the time is wasted on such non-value activities as waiting, unnecessary movement, locating misplaced items or documents etc. 4. Business Process Thinking Encourages a Focus on Quality The bane of good quality products or services in majority of organisations is the variation or inconsistency of process outcomes. Organisations with a process mentality continuously ferret out and eliminate sources of variation to achieve consistent results. This is almost impossible to achieve within functionally oriented organisations as their narrow focus prevents awareness of the causes of problems that span functional boundaries. While a functional organisation might call for an arbitrary amount of improvement in quality (e.g. 10% reduction in defects) process oriented organisations apply a fact-based understanding of the relationship between results and the processes that drive them. Statistical tools are used to study what factors have the most significant impact and effort is focused on influencing these factors. 5. Business Process Thinking Institutionalises High Performance and Guarantees Execution of Organisational Priorities A focus on business processes institutionalises high performance in the following ways.
* Uses measures of performance that are meaningful to the customer and other stakeholders. This is very important in view of the axiom that what gets measured gets done. Rewards are aligned to measures, which in turn support valued customer and organisational outcomes.
|
More Articles:1. The Red Carpet Treatment The First 90 Days The Red Carpet Treatment Remember your first few days at your present job? Were you excited? Nervous? Did you worry about your ability accomplish the tasks given to you or the impression you would make on your new co-workers? Perhaps you were concerned about the impression your new co-workers would make on you. You would not be alone if you were feeling a little lost during your probationary period. Many people do. Since you know how it feels to be 'the new kid on the bloc… 2. Train Me -- But Follow Through By Denise O'Berry My mechanic has me trained. When I take my car in for an oil change, he places a sticker in the upper left hand corner of my windshield to remind me what date and mileage I should have my next maintenance completed. But every once in a while, he forgets to put the sticker on the window. Then I have to remember the date and mileage details.It's a good thing to train your customers and clients and it can help you pump up your bottom line. But if you choose that route, it's important to follow th… 3. Why Training Fails Sometimes when I conduct my workshop on Effective Meetings, one of the participants will ask, 'Where's my boss?'And I say, 'Your boss claimed to be an expert on holding effective meetings.'Then the person laughs. 'My boss needs to attend your workshop more than anyone in our company. And without our manager's support, no one will use this.'This is bad because if no one uses the ideas presented in a workshop, the client will conclude that training doesn't work. And then the company might abandon … 4. Management Development - Micromanagement Works! Ever been told not to micromanage your people? Because it irritates them and is a waste of your time, their time and leads to bad habits? Well it's all true. If you micromanage your people in all that they do, it will drive you and them nuts. But there is a way that micromanaging brings huge benefits to your management performance. Getting into the detail of everything each of your people does, will really damage your relationships with them. Sure, there are times where their hand needs to be he… |
||||
