Process management is usually associated with changes for the employees concerned. For these to take part in the changes and to master the new processes, special measures are required. Even though it is sometimes called the delicate side of progress, dealing with the individual’s side of a change is frequently the most testing and essential part of an authoritative change.
Think about a merger or procurement. The technical side of the change is positively unpredictable. It would help if you worked out the money–related courses of action of the arrangement, coordinated business frameworks, and settled on choices about the new association’s structure, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Be that as it may, getting individuals ready and taking an interest in the merger or procurement can affect progress and disappointment.
From Thinking in Functions to Thinking in Processes
Despite the great importance of processes in companies, they have been out of sight for many years. Instead, companies thought in the function category – and many still do so today. There is a development department, production, sales, accounting, customer service, and many other departments. Often, there were breaks at the departmental boundaries; the process flow mostly stalled there. Time was misspent, costs rose, and quality dropped.
Only in the early 1990s did the process idea return to the focus of companies. One trigger was the “Business Process Reengineering” concept by Michael Hammer and James Champy.
With his value chain model for describing the corporate strategy, Michael Porter also clarified that processes are the core of a company because they make visible which services are essential in the market in relation to customers and comparison with competitors.
With his process model of the value chain, Michael Porter also emphasized that processes are of different importance for a company’s success. The following can be distinguished:
- Core processes that directly contribute to added value, competitive advantage, and thus to the company’s sales and profits are core services; examples are sales, production, or product development.
- Supporting processes that are also important or necessary but do not directly add value; examples of such support services are bookkeeping, strategy planning, or maintenance of the IT infrastructure.
- Unnecessary processes have no purpose and do not contribute to any corporate goal. They may have made sense in the past but only exist because they have not yet been discontinued; it can hide examples of such reactive power in all specialist areas of the company.
Process Analysis and Process Design
Process management and the change to a process–oriented organization are complex projects in organizational development. Check on which occasions you intervene in your company or department’s running processes.
- What is the reason for the process analysis?
- What goals do you pursue with revising, redesigning, or optimizing the processes?
- Which departments are affected?
The following template describes the significant steps for analyzing and designing processes in the company. You will find step-by-step instructions and checklists for process analysis and process management in your company.
The following subtasks of process analysis and process design are dealt with in this template:
- Delimitation of the considered process (in scope / out of scope)
- Clarification of goals and strategies
- Description of core processes and sub-processes
- Location in the value chain model, according to Michael Porter
- Information research for process description (actual analysis)
- Process analysis with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks
- Assignment to process indicators for quality, time, costs
- Identification of weak points
- Analysis of process errors with the cause and effect diagram
- Action planning for process design and process improvement
It is helpful for process analysis if you put your processes in a flow chart. With the following template, you can visualize your processes on different levels and with further details.
Process description and process visualization often use standardized models and description languages. It should help to make processes comparable and to standardize or automate them.
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